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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

During the time my father was in the hospital, it made sense to leave the car in the hospital’s underground garage. I would stop at the top of the entrance’s small abyss and let my white Opel slide do...

www.flickr.com/people/paloetic “Everything has a price,” but how do you put a price tag on the human condition? In Mahmoud Saeed’s unflinching story of abjection and brutality, the moral...

In this tongue-in-cheek story from Ethiopia, a man ponders his spending habits, his proposal to regulate Ethiopian beggars, and whether to end his own life.    1.  I walked f...

For several days, it is quiet in the apartment. The sister and brother are playing quietly, and Daddy and Mama are not talking. The silence is thick and heavy. It echoes sometimes, too, when the boy a...