The following books offer insights into the hot, gritty quotidian of a desert nation and the machinations of an authoritarian power structure as integral to Egypt’s character as the Nile.The…
In Every Issue
From our vantage point here on the Oklahoma plains, we’re constantly reminded that we live in “Native America” (every time we look at the license plate of a car in front of us), but few probably reali…
Digital media editor Jen Rickard Blair’s summer reading picks range from multiethnic mystery to dystopian sci-fi. We suspect she’ll read these in a lawn chair or on the c…
Cat people: we aren’t known for much other than spinsterhood, paranoia, emotional and social disconnection. Our one spokesperson who’s more than quaint at best is Catwoman. But lately there’s been…
The WatchtowerElizabeth HarrowerThe Watchtower, first published in 1966, is a psychological novel of class and power set in Sydney in the 1940s. Laura, the elder sister, had ambitions to be a…-
[Borges’s] Argentinians act out Parisian dramas, his Central European Jews are wise in the ways of the Amazon, his Babylonians are fluent in the paradigms of Babel.– Anthony Kerrigan…
Photos by Laura HernandezClimbing up the steep and narrow staircase to the hidden apartment is when it hits me: Anne Frank lived here; this is where she spent two years, secluded, waiting for…
Wilfred Price has established himself as a respectable, reliable member of his small and tightly woven rural community of Narberth, Wales. He performs his duties impeccably as the town’s undertaker, c…- Over thirty-something years of music video, we have gotten what we might have expected of a new (?) art (?) form (?): the sedimentation of practices, followed by the stirring up of new possibilities;…
It should go without saying that children bear the brunt of war as a nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Yet Graça Machel’s 1996 UNICEF report on the impact of war on children was new in both scope and…
While working on the “Classics Rekindled” section that appears in this issue (page 35), I was struck by the following words from Anne Carson: “Every time a poet writes a poem he is asking the…
Translated literature is for grown-ups—or so goes conventional anglophone wisdom. And yet there are excellent translated titles available for younger readers, offering them a broader literary pala…
It’s the holiday season, and whether you’re shopping for Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Christmas, WLT has a new book for every reader on your list. For the ActivistJuliana Spahr…
What distinguishes the modern surveillance-and-control state from its predecessors is technodeterminism: the use of algorithms, not human beings, to monitor and shape citizens’ attitudes and behavior.…
For a Song and a Hundred Songs Liao YiwuNew Harvest, 2013Though Liao Yiwu is yet another name in a long line of censored Chinese literary and artistic critics like Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei, and Hu J…
In the print edition of WLT, I recommended LGBT books with a political slant. These books reflect the importance of our role as artists. At the intersection of art and sexuality, art must tru…- Not far from 23rd and L, where the hotel Havana Libre, the Yara movie theater, and the popular Coppelia ice cream parlor converge, Eliezer Jiménez’s bookshop offers a vast selection of books to curiou…
The Bridge of BeyondSimone Schwarz-Bart, Barbara Bray, tr. New York Review Books Classics, 2013Born in 1938 on the southwest coast of France, Caribbean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart spent her childh…- Lara Candland and Christian Asplund. Photo: Curtis Asplund“World music” has become part of an advertising lexicon promising the buyer of CDs entrée into unfamiliar conventions. The operatic creations…
More than a century after the abolition of slavery, the market for human beings is alive and well. From violent abductions and the sale of family members to voluntary…
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David SedarisLittle, Brown, 2013 In David Sedaris’s new collection, the essays begin with a visit to his Parisian dentist and end with his first…- Photo by Somak Sarkar. West Bengali singer-songwriter-politician Kabir Suman.Go look up “Bangladesh” in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Hmm. There is an entry for “Benga…
Writers of narrative or creative nonfiction often “immerse” themselves in places or with subjects for long periods in order to write about subjects intimately and in-depth. But due to familial res…
The Sarabande of Sara’s Band by Larysa DenysenkoMichael M. Naydan & Svitlana Bednazh, tr. Glagoslav Publications, 2013The familiar quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “H…- Inuit solo throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis. Photo: Sarah RaceThe Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic share an ancient form of music called katajjait (throat sin…