Fiction

Heavens on Earth (an excerpt)

By Carmen Boullosa

November 2016
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...
Danube 1954

By Zsuzsa Selyem

November 2016
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...
Dreamwriter (Autobiography)

By Gunnhild Øyehaug

November 2016
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...
The Gardens of Kammer Castle

By Zsuzsa Takács

November 2016
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...
Home

By Alison Wong

November 2016
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...
Why La Luna Did It / The Moon Mother

By Bárbara Renaud González

September 2016
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...
Tell Me What’s Happening to Me (an excerpt)

By Agustín del Moral Tejeda

September 2016
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...
A Creature of Habit

By Rumena Bužarovska

September 2016
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...
The Stone Wall

By Lee Upton

September 2016
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...
The Green Ball

By Lygia Fagundes Telles

May 2016
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-...
A Broken Foot, a Hex Wrench, and Baby Gaggia

By Anastasia Edel

May 2016
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...
Snow

By Carlos Pintado

May 2016
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...
Venom

By Zsófia Bán

March 2016
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...
Typhoid (an excerpt)

By Klaus Hoffer

January 2016
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...
The Meltdown

By Baret Magarian

January 2016
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...
The Catacombs

By Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

January 2016
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...
Prosopopoeia (an excerpt)

By Farid Tali

September 2015
Farid Tali

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

By Dipika Mukherjee

September 2015
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...
Gaspers 

By Yevgeny Lukin

May 2015
Yevgeny Lukin

Photo by Cranky Messiah/Flickr If you don’t gasp, find somewhere else to live.– Vladimir Ivanovich Dal I knew t...
Curtains (an excerpt)

By Saikat Majumdar

May 2015
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...
The Shipwrecked

By Moniru Ravanipour

March 2015
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...
Measure Twice, Cut Once

By Cate Kennedy

November 2014
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...
Anton

By Polona Glavan

November 2014
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...
Birds

By Wu Ming-yi

May-August 2014
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...
“The Blockage” by Žydrūnas Drungilas

By Žydrūnas Drungilas

March 2014
Žydrūnas Drungilas

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