Fiction

  • 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. Ph...

  • 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...

  • May-August 2014

    A Nutmeg Mannikin bird. Photo by Noel Reynolds.
       By Wu Ming-yi
    Photo by Noel Reynolds/Flickr “Birds” is one of the interrelated stories in Tianqiao shang de moshushi (Magician on the overpass), published in Taiwan in 2011. The enti...

  • March 2014

    Illustration by Marla Johnson
       By Žydrūnas Drungilas
    Žydrūnas Drungilas’s first book, Kita stotelė (Next stop), is a collection of texts in v...

  • January 2014

    Barcelona Streets
       By Eduard Màrquez
    Photo by Fernando Rodríguez/Flickr Zugzwang: a chess position where any move is disadvantageous. Eduard Màrquez applies the term to his characters who, he observes, “are subjected to forces and s...

  • November 2013

       By Peppe Fiore
    Via Prenestina. Photo by Carlo Busini/Flickr In contrast to Michela Murgia’s Il mondo deve sapere (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 43–46), Peppe Fiore’s Ness...

  • September 2013

       By Abdellah Taïa
    On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, the narrator recounts three near-death experiences and his journey from Morocco to France. With nods toward Dostoevsky and Genet (echoing the Lazarus scene be...

  • July 2013

       By Alberto Chimal
    Alberto Chimal published these stories in Spanish as “An Alphabet of Twitter-Stories: A Study by Horacio Kustos” (@hkustos) in summer 2012. In a self-interview Chimal published...

  • May 2013

       By Shaheen Akhtar
    Photo by crowdive/Flickr Based on a legend from eighteenth-century Bengal, Shokhi Rongomala is Shaheen Akhtar’s third novel. The book follows Rongomala, a beautiful and...
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