The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia / Photo by G. S. Matthews / FlickrReflecting on a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia and on the Dirty War in Argentina, her…
Essay
November 9, 2023
October 10, 2023Photo by Alexander Grey / UnsplashIn this follow-up piece connected to her “The Keepers of the Books” essay in WLT’s May 2023 cover feature, Alice-Catherine Carls examines the role of rea…
August 17, 2023Alexandria, 1934. The wedding of the author’s grandparents, Allegra (Freja) Berdugo and Armand (Abdu) Dayan.What of Egypt is left in the children of Egypt’s Jewish diaspora? The daughter of an imm…
August 2, 2023Photo by Daniel Bernard / UnsplashA translator discovers that an author—whom she has translated and admired for so long—was complicit in a past administration’s efforts to silence dissenting write…
June 29, 2023Photo by Javardh / UnsplashCarlos Labbé wonders whether it is “still possible to speak of experimental writing when we live in a reality where facts are constantly written in a language already pr…
June 21, 2023Photo by JR P / FlickrIn her new essay collection, These Particular Women (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023), Kat Meads writes about famous twentieth-century women, mostly authors. In this sh…
June 8, 2023Photo by Bekky Bekks / UnsplashHoping to see more peace and empathy in the world, a high school teacher in San Francisco creates a Peace Club where, in yielding control of an event to a sixteen-ye…
March 8, 2023Scene from Performance Survivor’s Syndrome, based on a work by Andriy Bondarenko, Harmyder Theater (Lutsk, Ukraine), directed by Ruslana Porytska (@ruslana.porytska), starring Vadym Khainskyi (@vadym…
March 1, 2023Photo by NASA / Unsplash “All our AI Frankenstein stories,” the author writes, “warn us that AI will destroy us, but far louder than that, they promise that the future is going to be mind-blowing…
January 4, 2023Kishore giving his acceptance speech for the Cesare De Michelis Prize in Venice, May 25, 2022 / Photo copyright © by Stefano Marchiante Naveen Kishore, publisher of Seagull Books, became the firs…
December 16, 2022Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language and culture have been repressed and russified for over two centuries by both tsarist Russia and the USSR. Michael M. Naydan looks at the evidence for Russia’…
October 17, 2022Susama Chitrakar and her husband, Sanjoy. How can a Patua artist like Susama, with a painted paper scroll and a song on her lips, compete with the streaming services providing nonstop entertainme…
August 16, 2022Reflecting on the recent attack on Salman Rushdie, Andrew Martino asks, “What does the attack on Rushdie tell us about ourselves, about our relationship to literature and writers?” Like most…
August 15, 2022A writer uses a step-by-step guide as a mode of recounting her past pains as an American Orthodox priest’s wife, then comes full circle to the present as she grapples with her powerlessness yet a…
June 2, 2022Photo by Alfons Morales / Unsplash In the following tribute, the author offers a reading of Pitol’s masterwork, El arte de la fuga. “Escape—flight—fugue,” he writes; “the polyphony of th…
May 10, 2022A Ukrainian American scholar in Philadelphia contemplates Americans’ waning interest in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Ukrainian, her first language, “diasporic words, words that resonate with r…
May 5, 2022Three cards from Courtney Alexander’s tarot deck, the Three of Blades, Young Coin (the collage includes the eyes of Misty Copeland), and the Ace of Staffs. How do images shape us culturally and a…
March 8, 2022Para on Lake Baikal in southern Siberia / Photo courtesy of the author Editorial note: “Siberian Romance,” a suite of Para’s poems, accompanies this introductory essay. Born in 1956, Jean-Ba…
March 8, 2022Photo by Jennifer Boyer / Flickr Berlin poet, essayist, and playwright Esther Dischereit responds to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the shelling near Babyn Yar, the site of Nazi Germany’s 19…
February 28, 2022“Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies,” Roberto Bolaño, who enjoyed accruing enemies in the pantheon of Latin American letters, writes in the short story “Meeting with Enrique Lihn” (…
February 24, 2022Photo by Steve Evans / Flickr A longtime scholar, translator, and promoter of Ukrainian literature reflects on the existential crisis confronting Ukraine—and the West—today. In Pavlo Tychyna…
February 2, 2022Photo by Miko Guziuk / Unsplash In his newest book, What Is American Literature? (Oxford University Press, 2022), award-winning cultural commentator, translator, and editor Ilan Stavans,…
January 3, 2022Photo by simpleinsomnia / Flickr If men and women reappraise the stories of masculinity they’ve received in texts by male authors, we all might better understand the stories we have. In the…
December 8, 2021Gurnah received the Nobel Prize medal and diploma from the Swedish ambassador on December 6 © Nobel Prize Outreach / Photo by Hugh Fox Earlier this week, Abdulrazak Gurnah received the 2021 …
October 20, 2021Photo by Eileen Pan / Unsplash “Instead of a totalizing interpretation,” writes the author, translators should seek a dialogical one. “We have to leave space,” he writes, “for a story, an anecdot…
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