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…
Fiction
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Giulia Riccobono, Thanatos (2008), Rome Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia is a work of postmodern elegy comprising narrative chapters that alternate with dense, lyr…
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…
Photo by Cranky Messiah/Flickr If you don’t gasp, find somewhere else to live.– Vladimir Ivanovich Dal I knew t…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
Žydrūnas Drungilas’s first book, Kita stotelė (Next stop), is a collection of texts in v…
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…
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…- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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. “…
- 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—…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
October 24, 2023
September 06, 2023
