Fiction

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...
Loneliness

By Eduard Màrquez

January 2014
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...
Anyone Can Be Replaced (an excerpt)

By Peppe Fiore

November 2013
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...
Turning Thirty

By Abdellah Taïa

September 2013
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...
The Cities of the Ordered Chain

By Alberto Chimal

July 2013
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...
Beloved Rongomala (an excerpt)

By Shaheen Akhtar

May 2013
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...
The Pendulous Death of Raimundo Manzanero

By Leonardo Padura

May 2013
Leonardo Padura

Photo by Tortured Mind Photography/Flickr Once again using the lens provided by detective fiction, Leonardo Padura magnifies various aspects of Cuban reality for his readers. “...
Renters

By Peter Orner

January 2013
Peter Orner

Marie and Frank were lifelong renters, and though moving their things out of a house was like unloading a ship, their old house didn’t sail away. It sat there, on the South Dakota plains, waiting—...
99%

By Kim Kyŏnguk

January 2013
Kim Kyŏnguk

Photo Shannalee/Flickr In the first translation of his work into English, South Korean writer Kim Kyŏnguk imagines an ad executive confronting a man who may be his f...
Continuity of Hell

By Andrés Neuman

September 2012
Andrés Neuman

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...
Oppenheimer Beach

By Tom Paine

November 2012
Tom Paine

In a haze of marijuana and beer, a vacationing photojournalist discusses the state of humanity with a West Indian boy. What are we without our addictions, our distractions, and are we doomed if we...
Lizards’ Colony

By Mahmoud Saeed

November 2012
Mahmoud Saeed

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...
The Prisoners of the Past

By Deena Padayachee

November 2012
Deena Padayachee

As this story about changing laws and changing times in South Africa reveals, repealing the letter of a law will not necessarily kill its insidious spirit. Photo illustration by...