September 20, 2021
August 4, 2021
Editors’ Picks
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With a toddler to parent, WLT’s book review editor, Rob Vollmar, isn’t anticipating being able to go much of anywhere this summer, so he’s relying on his summer reads to take... -
Editorial assistant Sara Wilson’s summer reading picks vary in content from knotty lovers’ quarrels to narratives gathered from the aftershock of warfare. She’s added some Neruda to h... -
Summer weather has already arrived in Austin, and it’s the perfect excuse for WLT’s digital media editor, Jen Rickard Blair, to jump-start her annual summer reading list. Her... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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,... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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 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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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... -
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...
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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...
