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…
In Every Issue
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- 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;…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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 Activist Juliana Spahr…
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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.…
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For a Song and a Hundred Songs Liao Yiwu New Harvest, 2013 Though Liao Yiwu is yet another name in a long line of censored Chinese literary and artistic critics like Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei, and Hu Jia…
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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…
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The Bridge of Beyond Simone Schwarz-Bart, Barbara Bray, tr. New York Review Books Classics, 2013 Born in 1938 on the southwest coast of France, Caribbean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart spent her childhood…
- 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 creation…
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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…
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Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris Little, Brown, 2013 In David Sedaris’s new collection, the essays begin with a visit to his Parisian dentist and end with his first colonos…
- 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 “Bengali…
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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…
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The Sarabande of Sara’s Band by Larysa Denysenko Michael M. Naydan & Svitlana Bednazh, tr. Glagoslav Publications, 2013 The familiar quotation from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy fa…
- Inuit solo throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis. Photo: Sarah Race The Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic share an ancient form of music called katajjait (throat…
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A friend recently came across a book review that described my novel, The Darlings, as a “financial thriller.” She wrinkled her nose. “Financial thriller?” she as…
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Angela Rodel, tr. Open Letter Books, 2013 “I believe that the longer I keep the shutter open the more life gets captured on the negative.” Bulgarian-born novelist and playwright Zachary Karab…
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Testimonial narrative is at once a discrete literary genre and an acknowledgment of the limits of literature itself. Rather than evoking oppression and brutality as fiction might, testimonial lite…
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In Beauty Bright, Gerald Stern, W. W. Norton, 2012 In “Four Crises,” an essay in his 2012 collection Stealing History, Gerald Stern writes: “Humans, because of their minds, because o…
- History is usually about the “big picture”: geopolitics, religious change, social movements. Sometimes, it’s about the “little picture” and called “everyday.” I like the latter—the story of how pe…
- About her mixed-genre recommendations, Giannina Braschi says, “I am always looking for originality. And originality is going back to the origin and finding an empty chair. Would you gladly sit on…
- If poets as far-flung as France, Cuba, India, and Nicaragua comprised the avant-garde of literary modernism, a lookout in a turret in Chicago, Illinois, saw the invasion coming to America and, instea…