Editors’ Picks | Page 2 | World Literature Today

Editors’ Picks

Director’s Pick: The Mexican Flyboy by Alfredo Véa Jr.

By Robert Con Davis-Undiano

May 2016
Robert Con Davis-Undiano

Alfredo Véa Jr. The Mexican Flyboy University of Oklahoma Press2016 Alfredo Véa Jr.’s The Mexican Flyboy is a novel likely to enhance its author’s reputation as a writer primed t...
Michelle Johnson’s Summer Reads

By Michelle Johnson

May 2016
Michelle Johnson

With two novels and one book of literary miscellany, WLT managing editor Michelle Johnson’s summer reading list is taking shape. Though she’ll no doubt spend many early morni...
Editor’s Pick: The Black Flower and Other Zapotec Poems by Natalia Toledo

By Daniel Simon

March 2016
Daniel Simon

Trans. Clare SullivanPhoneme Media, 2015 In an essay published in the January 2012 issue of World Literature Today, Clare Sullivan notes that poets who write in Zap...
Editor’s Pick: Tram 83 by Fiston Mwanza Mujila

By Jen Rickard Blair

January 2016
Jen Rickard Blair

Roland Glasser, tr. Deep Vellum. 2015. Tram 83 (2015) is a lively, frenetic novel filled with a motley cast of characters lustful for pleasure, prosperity, and power. It’s based in...
Editor’s Pick: The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction

By Michelle Johnson

November 2015
Michelle Johnson

Jim Hinks, Masashi Matsuie & Michael Emmerich, eds. Manchester. Comma Press. 2015. ISBN 9781905583577. This new collection of short stories by Japanese writers, all set in Tokyo,...
Editor’s Pick: The Mountain and the Wall and The Vienna Melody

By Rob Vollmar

September 2015
Rob Vollmar

The Mountain and the Wall By Alisa GanievaDeep Vellum The Vienna Melody By Ernst LotharEuropa Editions Alisa Ganieva’s The Mountain and the Wall (201...
Editor’s Pick: The Silent History, by Eli Horowitz

By Kaitlin Hawkins

March 2015
Kaitlin Hawkins

If a written, spoken language is one of the characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals, what would happen if the ability to speak—to even comprehend the spoken word—suddenly vanished...
Editor’s Pick: Second Childhood by Fanny Howe

By Daniel Simon

January 2015
Daniel Simon

Graywolf Press, 2014 How much of a poet’s biography can be read into (or behind) a book of poems? In the case of Fanny Howe’s latest collection, Second Childhood, the temptation to project...
Editor’s Pick: The Poetry Deal by Diane di Prima

By Michelle Johnson

November 2014
Michelle Johnson

Still writing “on this earthquake fault” in San Francisco, feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima continues to create her revolutionary verse. At eighty, aged out of the thirty-under-thirty and forty-under...
Editor’s Pick: An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

By Jen Rickard Blair

September 2014
Jen Rickard Blair

With a dose of wit and self-deprecation, Aaliya is a narrator who doesn’t fail to entertain. Rabih Alameddine invites the reader into Aaliya’s late-life crisis where—after a few glasses of red wine—sh...
Editor’s Pick: The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals by Wendy Jones

By Marla Johnson

March 2014
Marla Johnson

Wilfred Price has established himself as a respectable, reliable member of his small and tightly woven rural community of Narberth, Wales. He performs his duties impeccably as the town’s undertaker, c...
Editor’s Pick: The Dailiness by Lauren Camp

By Daniel Simon

January 2014
Daniel Simon

While working on the “Classics Rekindled” section that appears in this issue (page 35), I was struck by the following words from Anne Carson: “Every time a poet writes a poem he is asking the...
A Garden of Forking Paths

By Frederick Turner

January 2014
Frederick Turner

A review of The Gardens of Flora Baum, by Julia Budenz, 5 vols. (Chelmsford, Massachusetts: Carpathia Press, 2011) It is, perhaps, asking too much to expect a reader, who has not lived in th...
Editor’s Pick: For a Song and a Hundred Songs by Liao Yiwu

By Kaitlin Hawkins

November 2013
Kaitlin Hawkins

For a Song and a Hundred Songs Liao Yiwu New Harvest, 2013 Though Liao Yiwu is yet another name in a long line of censored Chinese literary and artistic critics like Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei, and Hu Jia...
Editor’s Pick: The Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart

By Sara Wilson

September 2013
Sara Wilson

The Bridge of Beyond Simone Schwarz-Bart, Barbara Bray, tr. New York Review Books Classics, 2013 Born in 1938 on the southwest coast of France, Caribbean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart spent her childhood...
Editor’s Pick: Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

By Michelle Johnson

July 2013
Michelle Johnson

Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris Little, Brown, 2013 In David Sedaris’s new collection, the essays begin with a visit to his Parisian dentist and end with his first colonos...
Editor’s Pick: The Sarabande of Sara’s Band

By Marla Johnson

May 2013
Marla Johnson

The Sarabande of Sara’s Band by Larysa Denysenko Michael M. Naydan & Svitlana Bednazh, tr. Glagoslav Publications, 2013 The familiar quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy fa...
Editor’s Pick: 18% Gray by Zachary Karabashliev

By Jen Rickard Blair

March 2013
Jen Rickard Blair

Angela Rodel, tr. Open Letter Books, 2013 “I believe that the longer I keep the shutter open the more life gets captured on the negative.” Bulgarian-born novelist and playwright Zachary Karab...
Editor’s Pick: In Beauty Bright by Gerald Stern

By Daniel Simon

January 2013
Daniel Simon

In Beauty Bright, Gerald Stern, W. W. Norton, 2012 In “Four Crises,” an essay in his 2012 collection Stealing History, Gerald Stern writes: “Humans, because of their minds, because o...
Editor's Pick: The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine

By Daniel Simon

September 2012
Daniel Simon

If poets as far-flung as France, Cuba, India, and Nicaragua comprised the avant-garde of literary modernism, a lookout in a turret in Chicago, Illinois, saw the invasion coming to America and, instea...
Editor's Pick: Drifting House (Viking) by Krys Lee

By Jen Rickard Blair

July 2012
Jen Rickard Blair

Krys Lee’s new collection of short stories, Drifting House, is a stirring debut that propels Korean literature further into a modern era of postnational themes. Lee’s characters are not hero...
Editor's Choice: The Life of Rebecca Jones, Angharad Price

By Marla Johnson

May 2012
Marla Johnson

Angharad Price The Life of Rebecca Jones Lloyd Jones, tr.MacLehose Press Welsh author Angharad Price offers us a welcome respite from our frenzied twenty-first-century lives in her absorbin...

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