The “Keep Austin Weird” adage has grown to mean something unique among many Austinites—it’s long been a celebration of creative resistance, a clash between economic growth and eccentricity. In recent…
In Every Issue
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Anna Maria Schenkel, Nina George, and Sascha Arango. Schenkel photo: Jürgen Bauer, George photo: Jakob B. Ârner, Arango photo: Frank May Although the impact of German culture on America is enormous i…
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Trans. Clare SullivanPhoneme Media, 2015 In an essay published in the January 2012 issue of World Literature Today, Clare Sullivan notes that poets who write in Zap…
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Vincent Segal & Ballaké Sissoko Musique de Nuit Six Degrees Now that a representative sample of the world’s recorded music is available at no greater cost than an hour’s worth of drill-do…
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Schodt with manga legend Osamu Tezuka in 1981. I’ve translated manga off and on for nearly forty years, and it is hard to imagine any translation process that has changed more radically in that time.…
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Photo: Rae Allen In 2008 global humanitarian organization UNESCO classified Melbourne, Australia, an official City of Literature. It’s one of only eleven cities to bear the title wor…
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Photo courtesy of the Port Eliot Festival Deep in the Cornish countryside, in the tiny village of St Germans, sits the house and estate of Port Eliot. A plot of land Napoleon himself claimed to be th…
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Roland Glasser, tr. Deep Vellum. 2015. Tram 83 (2015) is a lively, frenetic novel filled with a motley cast of characters lustful for pleasure, prosperity, and power. It’s based in…
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Photo by Stephen Murphy New Zealand is, relatively speaking, a tiny country with a population half the size of New York City and in a location so remote, a commercial flight from Los Angeles takes ov…
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Amjad Ali Khan and Rahim AlHaj The sarod is an instrument used in North Indian classical music whose origin is shrouded in mystery and no small amount of controversy. What is not in dispute is Amjad…
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In Among the Bieresch, the young narrator, Hans, is sent to his father’s ancestral village in the easternmost province of the “Empire” (a surreal postwar Austria). His uncle…
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Untrustworthy narrators twist and turn throughout literature. There are myriad reasons for their lack of reliability. Some are inherently withholding, while others carry on with thei…
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Kolkata. Photo by Matthew Winterburn/Flickr Kolkata has much to offer any traveler, whether history buff, literary aficionado, culture seeker, or wandering flâneur. In several places around the city,…
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Jim Hinks, Masashi Matsuie & Michael Emmerich, eds. Manchester. Comma Press. 2015. ISBN 9781905583577. This new collection of short stories by Japanese writers, all set in Tokyo,…
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From the opening ascending arpeggio of “Taquito Militar,” the thoughtful interplay between guitarist Berta Rojas and Argentina’s most beloved chamber group, Camerata Bariloche, takes center stage on…
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In the past decade, especially, much has been written about Iranian memoirs and particularly the nonfiction of Iranian females of the diaspora. Within that, many Iranian American fiction writers (such…
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Photo by Tanya Traboulsi If ever an album has been created to invite the uninitiated to dip a toe into the deep water of contemporary Arab music, it is Alif’s debut release, Aynama-Rtama, re…
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The Mountain and the Wall By Alisa GanievaDeep Vellum The Vienna Melody By Ernst LotharEuropa Editions Alisa Ganieva’s The Mountain and the Wall (201…
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While the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been going on for fourteen years, much of American literature from these conflicts is only now emerging. I appreciate the veterans who’ve woven the s…
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Photo by Christian Holzinger/Unsplash The editors of WLT have each selected three books they’re looking forward to reading this summer. Peruse our selections to get ideas for your own summer…
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Summer is here, and that means one thing: vacation! Whether you’re on a grand exploration or simply relaxing with a staycation, WLT is here to provide a getaway that you can hold in your…
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If a written, spoken language is one of the characteristics that distinguishes humans from other animals, what would happen if the ability to speak—to even comprehend the spoken word—suddenly vanished…
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A still from Shelley Niro’s Honey Moccasin. We are all painfully aware of the dominant cinematic representations of Native women—the princess, the sexualized maiden, the work drudge (sq**w).…
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Bridging Enigma: Cubans on Cuba Edited by Ambrosio Fornet This special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (vol. 96, no. 1, Winter 1997) presents Cuban reality as seen by sixt…
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Happy Are the Happy Yasmina Reza John Cullen, tr. A short advance excerpt from Yasmina Reza’s new novel fairly crackles with electric wit and precise comedic timing. Her award-winning talent as a pl…