Fiction

  • January 2017

    Mexico City’s TAPO station from above. Photo: Anthony Quigley
       By Nadia Villafuerte
    Mexico City’s TAPO station from above. Photo: Anthony Quigley She picks up her suitcase. Gets in line. Shows her ticket without letting her fist tremble. Checks her luggage. They’re not...

  • November 2016

    A grouse on a snowy branch in winter
       By Iben Mondrup
    Photo: Gerry Paille/Flickr In this story from a snowy Greenland, a woman reluctantly joins her husband in the woods for a grouse hunt. Ready . . . aim . . .  She’s still in bed. She...

  • November 2016

    Tamas Galambos, Summer, 1981, oil on canvas. A detail from Galambos’s painting also appears on the cover of García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude reprinted by Penguin London in 2000.
       By Carmen Boullosa
    Tamas Galambos, Summer, 1981, oil on canvas. A detail from Galambos’s painting also appears on the cover of García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude reprinted by Peng...

  • November 2016

    Photo: Funkyfood London - Paul Williams / Alamy
       By Zsuzsa Selyem
    Photo: Funkyfood London - Paul Williams / Alamy Along the shore of the Danube, a cat reflects on world history and human nature. From Oppenheimer to Donne to Stalin to Ana Pauker the mus...

  • November 2016

    Photo by Jo Christian Oterhals
       By Gunnhild Øyehaug
    Photo by Jo Christian Oterhals If, the woman thinks, she were an airplane that crashed and someone located the little black box, that would be the sentence they found, to hear water, but...

  • November 2016

    Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria / Artothek / Bridgeman images
       By Zsuzsa Takács
    Gustav Klimt, Allée in the Gardens of Schloss Kammer, 1912, oil on canvas. Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria / Artothek / Bridgeman images Ride the tram through...

  • November 2016

    Photo: flickr.com/people/duluoz_cats
       By Alison Wong
    Photo: flickr.com/people/duluoz_cats With Neil Young playing in the background, a New Zealand woman living in Australia recrosses the ocean over a game of Checkers.  Luke shakes the...

  • September 2016

    Moon and Sun artwork
       By Bárbara Renaud González
    A long, long, time ago, in the time of the gods, two of them were in love with the same goddess. Que hermosa, with her shining white and blue-blue rainbow hair surrounded by stars circling her like e...

  • September 2016

    Photo by Juan Di Nella/Unsplash
       By Agustín del Moral Tejeda
    Photo by Juan Di Nella/Unsplash I’m not the first to ask, but for a long time I’ve been wondering about one of the first dilemmas we’ve faced as a band: the question of language. To put it in terms o...

  • September 2016

    Photo by Ariel Dovas
       By Rumena Bužarovska
    Photo by Ariel Dovas Stasis and disruption go head to head in this story from Macedonia. It’s not clear whether my husband is going to be ambassador for much longer, as he might be...

  • September 2016

    Mountains and light
       By Lee Upton
    Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. – Robert Frost Even from a distance we could tell something was wrong with the wall. When we went out to the pasture the ground seemed f...

  • May 2016

    Green sequins. Photo by Soffie Hicks
       By Lygia Fagundes Telles
    Photo by Soffie Hicks In this story by Brazil’s nominee for the Nobel Prize, a young girl will let nothing stop her from attending Carnival, not even her dying father. The blue-and-...

  • May 2016

    Baby Gaggia
       By Anastasia Edel
    A broken foot is poor luck and a nuisance. It cancels everything from hikes to trips to Germany. It gives your insurance company an opportunity to feast and acquaints you with an orthopedist, often m...

  • May 2016

    A blue house with snow on the roof and trees.
       By Carlos Pintado
    Photo by Michael Andrews On her eightieth birthday, a woman waits for a telephone call in this story inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet.” How can everything change without our realiz...

  • March 2016

    Kaitlin. Image: © Masha watercolor
       By Zsófia Bán
    Image: © Masha watercolor In this story, Hungarian author Zsófia Bán writes into a little-known episode from Hungary’s tangled and traumatic pre–and post–World War II history, centered a...

  • January 2016

    Read Cole’s note about translating Among the Bieresch in the January 2016 issue of WLT.
       By Klaus Hoffer
    First published in two parts in 1979 and 1983, Among the Bieresch was praised by critics, winning the Rauris Literature Prize and the Döblin Prize. Forthcoming in English translation fro...

  • January 2016

    Photo by Brook Ward (Flickr.com/brookward)
       By Baret Magarian
    Photo by Brook Ward  (Flickr.com/brookward) Some years ago a diabolical fire, triggered by lightning, ravaged Donmark cathedral. It was a terrible tragedy, though fortunately no lives were lost and n...

  • January 2016

    Photo by Eduard Kreis/Flickr
       By Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen
    Photo by Eduard Kreis/Flickr Deciding to throw off life’s stagnation, a woman moves from Finland to Italy and takes up tossing coins in fountains. But just how much change can s...

  • September 2015

    Giulia Riccobono,Thanatos (2008), Rome
       By Farid Tali
    Giulia Riccobono, Thanatos (2008), Rome Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia is a work of postmodern elegy comprising narrative chapters that alternate with dense, lyr...

  • September 2015

    Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia
       By Dipika Mukherjee
    In this story written in response to current events in Malaysia, a writer confronts the doppelgänger intended to silence her political speech. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia. P...

  • May 2015

    Gasp graffiti on side of a rail car. Photo by Cranky Messiah/Flickr
       By Yevgeny Lukin
    Photo by Cranky Messiah/Flickr                                                             If you don’t gasp, find somewhere else to live.– Vladimir Ivanovich Dal  I knew t...

  • May 2015

    The Firebird by Saikat Majumdar
       By Saikat Majumdar
    In late-twentieth-century India, a boy whose mother is a stage actress grows up in a traumatic relationship with a viscerally compelling but dying art form—commercial theatre.  The sprawling...

  • March 2015

    Moniru Ravanipour. Photo by Aaron Mayes
       By Moniru Ravanipour
    To accompany Omid Fallahazad’s interview with Ravanipour that appears in the March 2015 print edition, the Feminist Press has generously granted WLT permission to reprint the title story...

  • November 2014

    Photo by Randall Epp
       By Cate Kennedy
    A man finishes a cedar hall closet, a wedding gift for his wife, but is the time he spends creating something perfect revealing something flawed? Photo by Randall Epp Sam found him in the...

  • November 2014

    Cup of tea by a window
       By Polona Glavan
    Photo by Victoria Calligo y Solivella While Slovene writer Polona Glavan’s debut novel explored the journey of young Europeans, in the following story, two widowed neighbors for...
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