What to Read Now

Summer 2020

Summer Reads

By The Editors of WLT

We asked several writers and our readers to tell us about a book that’s too heavy for beach reading, but they’re taking it anyway—if they’re able to get to a beach. Whether you (or they) are able...
Spring 2020

Cities

By Poupeh Missaghi

I'VE ALWAYS BEEN drawn to narratives of cities, both as a reader and as a writer. In the early stages of my writing life, I loved reading depictions of Paris by writers such as Stein,...
Winter 2020

Three Small-Town Noir Novels

By Leslie Shimotakahara

ALTHOUGH I'VE SPENT most of my life in large cities, I’ve long been attracted to mystery novels set in more remote areas. Something about the isolated atmospheres of small towns—somet...
Autumn 2019

Borders

By Sasha Pimentel

BORDERS, OFTEN CONFUSED for boundaries, are first imagined by groups who insist power over geographies that surpass such insistence. So limits are invented into rivers and fo...
Summer 2019

Four Climate Fiction Novels

By Amy Brady

HOW DO WE MAKE SENSE of a warming planet when the causes of the warming are so big, so systemic, they’re difficult to even think about, let alone fully understand? Where scientific...
Spring 2019

Contemporary Russian-language Literature

By Olga Zilberbourg

WHEN WE SAY “Russian literature” we think about the classics, but contemporary Russian-language writing is as vibrant as it is geographically and politically diverse. Within the Russi...
Winter 2019

Horror in Translation

By Rachel Cordasco

HORROR COMES IN many forms and from all over the world. Whether it’s psychological horror that invites us to confront our deepest fears or biohorror that anticipates humanity’s genet...
November 2018

Rereading Demons and The Brothers Karamazov

By Zoran Živković

WHAT DO TWO LATE masterpieces by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, Demons (1872) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), have in common, apart from the technical fact that the action of b...
September 2018

Young-Adult Lit by Latina Authors

By Lilliam Rivera

ONE OF THE FIRST BOOKS I read as a teen was C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I was transported into a fantastical world that could occur by simply walking...
July 2018

Literary Cookbooks

By Carrie Helms Tippen

I f you’re not one of those people who has a stack of cookbooks on your nightstand already, you might not know that there’s a lot more to read in a cookbook than just the recipes. Cookbooks can be a s...
May 2018

Unrequited Love

By Lori Feathers

T hree brief, powerful novels in recent translation enriched my reading during the last few months. Stories of unrequited love, their protagonists suffer an unsatisfied, persistent longing for affirma...
March 2018

Palestinian Literature

By Hala Alyan

Naomi Shihab Nye Sitti’s Secrets Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers I remember coming across this beautifully written (and illustrated) children’s book when I was...
January 2018

Gothic Novels for Midwinter

By Eleanor Wasserberg

One of my favorite book events ever was a celebration of gothic literature in Stoke Newington, London: it was held in a candlelit old church, and we read from Frankenstein before discussing...
November 2017

From Aden to Kampala to Washington, DC

By Stanley Gazemba

I bought Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy on a visit to her Somaliland hometown, Hargeisa. When I visited, Hargeisa was a dreary city—at least that was my first impression—until I got to kno...
September 2017

Selected Works from the African Diaspora

By Mahtem Shiferraw

This is not the Africa you knew. These books, some rooted in Africa but mostly embedded in multiple lands, explore issues of race, equality, immigration, cultural shifts, and more. At their core, they...
May 2017

What to Read Now: Summer Reading List 2017

By WLT

Photo: Bequest/Pixabay By a lake, on a train, deep in a canyon, or at home on your back porch: it’s time to catch up on the outstanding global writing publishers have been bringing out since January....
March 2017

What to Read Now: Activism Literature

By Timothy Bradford

Illustration: Verso Books Despite the popular culture trope that the golden age of activism (the 1950s and ’60s) is over, despite the endless distractions offered by digital entertainment, and despit...
January 2017

What to Read Now: When Civilization Fails

By Anastasia Edel

With two world wars, revolutions, famines, colonial violence, and state-sponsored genocides, the twentieth century was the most murderous in history, claiming the lives of some two hundred million peo...
November 2016

What to Read Now: Imagination and the Environment

By Pireeni Sundaralingam

In an era in which we spend an increasing number of our waking hours immersed in virtual and augmented realities, gliding across the two-dimensional surfaces of a placeless digital world, it is perhap...
September 2016

Four Books from Malaysia

By Dipika Mukherjee

The appetite for Malaysian fiction in the English-speaking world seems fixated on family sagas set in the Japanese Occupation of Malaya—stories largely irrelevant to the current sociopolitical challen...
March 2016

Three Quintessential Books to Add to Your “Russian Masters” List

By Anastasia Edel

It is not unusual for those on a quest to understand Russia to plough through Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy; the more adventurous add Bulgakov and Pasternak to their lists. Yet Russia of the twent...