Fiction
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Apologia? Manifesto? Confessional? In this stream-of-consciousness narrative, a Havana drag queen tells her story. “Fátima, Queen of the Night,” published here for the first time, won Cuban writer... -
Nov. 2009 WLT Writer Mikhail Shishkin won Russia’s 2005 National Bestseller Prize and the 2006 Big Book Prize for his novel Maidenhair, whose narrator works in...
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Sept. 2010 WLT Reinaldo Arenas was born in a small village in Cuba’s Oriente province on July 16, 1943. He was an early supporter of the Cuban Revolution, joining the rebels in the mountains...
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Nov. 2010 WLT The nurse left work at five o’clock. She had seen the dead woman’s husband sitting, near the entrance, under the yellow sign that Doctor Ahmed had hung some months ago. “While Y...
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Sept. 2008 WLT Sometimes I think about him, and then I miss him terribly. Especially at night. I can’t fall asleep. I’m too hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s never exactly right...
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Sept. 2009 WLT They had us sitting together though we didn’t want to. We even said we didn’t. At that our teacher whisked her cane staff through the air, with an astonishing alacrity given he...
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It’s Christmas, and since it’s Christmas it seems repugnant not to have a steady boyfriend to give one gifts. A boyfriend, in short, who will take you to the Ebro River Delta from time to time, a plac...
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Still from The Coward (1965), based on Mitra’s story, directed by Satyajit Ray and starring Soumitra Chatterjee and Madhabi Mukherjee Karuna brought me my morning cup of tea herself. I co...
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Two friends in New York City find themselves unexpectedly at a roundabout where life, love, desire, and death all want right of way. In the struggle that ensues, there is a winner, but it isn’t o...
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Adrianne Kalfopoulou And then what you wanted was salt, . . . but you could not turn to look. —Cecilia Woloch, “Salt” My parents were deliberate about escaping their place of origin an...
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Zainab. Zaina-a-a-a-b. Zainab. Is it really you catching me in this muffled moment? No, you have not changed. But where is your body? You approach with your usual smile, seductive as ever...
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The Long Way Home by Carsten Jenson The following excerpt serves as the introduction to Vi sejlede bare (2009; We just sailed)—Jensen’s elegant book on the making of We, the...
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African immigrants have permeated the Eurozone in recent years, legally and illegally, in search of economic opportunities among the demographically aging populations of the north. In Austrian wr...
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Hiromi Kawakami (b. 1958) is a highly regarded Japanese novelist. She was awarded the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1994 for Hebi o fumu (Tread on a snake). To date, her only novel av...
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Every couple inhabit a private world of their own, and share an intimate language of words, silence, and gestures that only they understand. Such is a love story between a deaf husband and a blind...
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The fabulous real-life fables of Ermanno Cavazzoni’s Brief Lives of Idiots portray “fools” who can’t recognize their own kin, miserably fail at suicide, or didn’t think the concentration...
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A seemingly ordinary day in Nairobi ends in tragedy and forces a confrontation between a city woman and her husband's tribe. Photo: Meena Kadri The matatu minibus was doing eighty miles an ho...
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While waiting for a train, a woman enters a teashop and decides to act with uncharacteristically reckless abandon. She orders the most unusual tea on the menu: tea with stories. In this s...
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Ukrainian writer Tanya Malyarchuk’s work fuses Chekhov-like psychological portraits of characters with magical realism. Many of her most fascinating narratives focus on her life growing up amid th...
