Essays | Page 3 | World Literature Today

Essays

November 2018

Playtime in Vienna: The Austrian Literary Scene Finds Its Sense of Humor

By Mandakini Pachauri, Keija Parssinen

The O-Töne literary festival brings hundreds of people to the central square of MuseumsQuartier. Photo courtesy of O-Töne. At the new Literaturmuseum, nestled in a historic building on Johannesgasse...
September 2018

Mashrou’

By Janice Weizman

Photo: Matan Eldar Israel and Lebanon, Hebrew and Arabic—so close, yet so far away. I'm driving down the coastal road, flashes of bright blue sea, glimmering gold and silver in...
September 2018

Poems as Lyrics: Poemas musicalizados in Uruguay

By Jesse Lee Kercheval

Tatiana Oroño and the musician Daniel Petruchelli, who set her poem “Elogio del camino” to music, taken at a performance at the Casa de los escritores (House of Writers) in Montevideo / Photos by Mar...
September 2018

Amelia Curran: “I Am the Song”

By Andrew DuBois

Photo: Amelia Curran. © Six Shooter Records Is Canadian singer-songwriter Amelia Curran a mix of Leonard Cohen and Patsy Cline? A juggler of Robert Frost’s poems? Andrew DuBois considers her art...
September 2018

The Rehearsal: Poetry-Jazz in Addis Ababa

By Eric Ellingsen

Inside the Fendika Cultural Center that houses the artists’ rehearsal space. All Photos (except where noted): Eric Ellingsen “Poetry is not a form, but rather a result.” –Amiri Baraka In front...
September 2018

In the Den of the Voice

By Philip Metres

An overgrown yard at a factory where statues of Lenin and other Soviet leaders used to be made. Photo: Philip Metres In the Den of the Voice” is part of The More You Love the Motherland...
July 2018

Slaying New Black Notions: Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”

By Ladan Osman

Photo: A still from “This is America” by Childish Gambino Poet Ladan Osman considers how Childish Gambino obliterates rooted acts of black optimism and expression, leading us to underst...
July 2018

Blind Spots: The 2018 Puterbaugh Keynote

By Jenny Erpenbeck

Photo: Shevaun Williams & Associates After watching the dance adaptation of her story “Sand” at the 2018 Puterbaugh Festival, Erpenbeck delivered the following keynote, in which she...
July 2018

Celebrating 50 Years of the Puterbaugh Festival

By WLT

This year’s fiftieth-anniversary Puterbaugh Festival of International Literature & Culture set a new high-water mark in the cultural life of the University of Oklahoma, in a series already distin...
July 2018

The Enduring Impermanence of Jenny Erpenbeck

By Necia Chronister

The Eclipse, by Viktor Ash. This wall painting at Urban Spree Berlin was part of a pop-up exhibition to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Ash’s Astronaut /Cosmonaut...
July 2018

Lin Shu, Author of the Quixote

By Mikaël Gómez Guthart

A monument to Don Quixote in Tandil, Argentina. Photo: Carlos Barengo/Pixabay China is so peculiarly revealing in its essence that few authors can approach it without unveiling their inn...
July 2018

Yu Xiuhua: A Life Lived in Poetry

By Dian Li

Still from Still Tomorrow (2016), dir. Jian Fan, produced by Youku Tudou, Inc. She is a subsistence farmer with a ninth-grade education and a disabled person with speec...
May 2018

In Memoriam Claribel Alegría: Amor sin fin

By George Evans, Daisy Zamora

left Claribel Alegría, 1953. right Flakoll-Alegría family, 1959. Left to right: Patricia, Erik, Claribel, Karen, Maya, Bud. Photos used by permission of Er...
May 2018

The Power of Normal: Exploring the Notion of Story Structure

By Nii Ayikwei Parkes

photo: three-shots/pixabay As readers, we all carry prejudices, but acknowledging a wider range of normals makes the difference between “I don’t understand your normal” and “I refuse to...
May 2018

The Special Case of Jamaican Patois

By Erik Gleibermann

Editorial note: This sidebar appears with Erik Gleibermann’s essay “Inside the Bilingual Writer” in the same issue M arlon James’s use of Jamaican Patois in his 2015 Booker Prize–winning nove...
May 2018

Inside the Bilingual Writer

By Erik Gleibermann

Daniel Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Ha Jin, Esmeralda Santiago, and Gary Shteyngart. Illustration by Jen Rickard Blair Through a series of interviews, E...
March 2018

Fractured but Whole, Separated but Together

By Joseph O. Legaspi

Bonifacio Global City, Manila, 2015. photo: jason reblando In 2015, while on a Fulbright research fellowship in the Philippines, I went on a walking tour of Intramuros, the famed walled city in Mani...
March 2018

Conversations at the Edge of Carnage

By Laurel Flores Fantauzzo

The missing persons bulletin board at Navotas City Police Station in Metro Manila, June 2017. Photo courtesy of the author Do so many opportunities to bear witness only create opportuniti...
March 2018

Bowled Over – A Life with Poems: The 2017 NSK Prize Keynote

By Marilyn Nelson

photos: shevaun williams & associates After being visibly moved by dance adaptations of four of her poems, Dr. Nelson delivered the following keynote to the packed audience in attendance, wh...
March 2018

Reinventing and Reimagining the World: A Tribute to Marilyn Nelson

By Hayan Charara

A statue of a young Carver at the George Washington Carver National Monument. photo: jinx!/flickr Hayan Charara, a poet, editor, essayist, and children’s book author, nominated Marilyn Nelson for...
March 2018

Migration, My Mother, and Me

By Sabina Murray

The Seer, by Maia Cruz Palileo A writer undergoes a transformation while overcoming a series of obstacles as she works to reunite her mother with her mother’s siblings in the Philippine...
March 2018

The Return of Scheherazade, or the Rise of the Iraqi Novel after 2003

By Sadek R. Mohammed

Mohammed Ghani Hikmat’s Save Iraqi Culture sculpture, featuring ancient Sumerian cuneiform script, is located in Baghdad’s Mansour District. The figure with multiple hands represents the dif...
March 2018

Trout Fishing in Tehran

By Shohreh Laici

illustration: jen rickard blair On the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, an Iranian writer (and devoted Brautigan reader) considers how he, perhaps ev...
January 2018

Border Ghosts

By Kapka Kassabova

Border village in winter, Turkey. Photo: Nedret Benzet Returning to the Bulgaria of her childhood, the author chronicles the insidious damage that a culture of hard borders inflicted on its sur...
January 2018

The Silenced Language

By Liliana Ancalao

The kultrún is the quintessential Mapuche instrument. A drum of carved wood and animal hide, it is traditionally played by a machi, or Mapuche shaman, during rituals and celebrations. Althou...

Follow Us

Add the WLT Weekly in a reader

Join the WLT Weekly email

Subscription Options

Print Subscription
Digital Subscription
WLT on the Magzter app
Or donate!

The University of Oklahoma Press

REVIEW WLT

Tell us what you think about the current issue or about the website by filling out our form.

WLT FOR INSTITUTIONS

Get WLT in print, digitally, or both!

As a part of the JSTOR CSP program, access the new issues and archives of WLT seamlessly.

World Literature Today
630 Parrington Oval, Suite 110
Norman, OK 73019-4037
405-325-4531

Updated by World Literature Today: [email protected]