Five or six years ago, I was reading Ihsan Abdel Quddous (1919–1990) with my Arabic teacher and thought of writing an article about him in English, but I found only one translation on Amazon. I was pu…
Book Reviews
- Caroline Cingria, C. F. Ramuz, pastel (1903) / Images courtesy of Noël CordonierLumen Obscurum Light and darkness are a major part of the global human experience; their contrast is a…
- Photo of the author by Jeff Norman / ZeinaAzzam.comIn Zeina Azzam’s mesmerizing collection of poems Some Things Never Leave You (Tiger Bark Press, 2023), tenderness means gazing directly at w…
- Winner of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, Fernando Vallejo’s The Abyss (New Directions, 2024) is reaching new audiences in Yvette Siegert’s updated English translation. Twenty-three years after it…
- Gjekë Marinaj’s Teach Me How to Whisper: Horses and Other Poems, co-translated by the author and Frederick Turner (Syracuse University Press, 2023), marks the English debut of an Albanian-bor…
- The first sentence of Janice Weizman’s The Wayward Moon (Toby Press, 2024) sets the stage with clarity and precision: “I, Rahel Bat Yair, was born in the city of Sura, which lies on the weste…
- Photo of Diop by Gavyn Redd / Shevaun Williams PhotographyOn September 26, 2002, Le Joola, the passenger ship relaying Dakar to Ziguinchor in the south of Senegal, capsized on its way to Daka…
- Covid-19 took the toll of over seven million lives globally since the pandemic began in late 2019. In the US alone the death toll estimate is more than a million. Yet this devastating tragedy has bee…
- A recent Parisian exhibit about the pre-impressionists revealed that before painting techniques changed, artists abandoned heroic subjects and eternal, noble emotions to portray ordinary people and sc…
- Photo by Shane LeonardAs I wrote in World Literature Today some years ago, the quality of Stephen King’s writing abilities are all too frequently underestimated because of his popularity and…
- With its stunning wraparound cover, featuring a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, this edition of Raoul Vaneigem’s landmark Resistance to Christianity: A Chro…
- Olivia Elias’s singular voice has not gone unnoticed in the Palestinian poetic landscape. A French-speaking poet and child of the Nakba, her work, published only since 2015, has already been picked up…
- In the book dedicated to her sister Liliana, who was murdered at the age of twenty by her ex-boyfriend on July 16, 1990, Cristina Rivera Garza includes transcriptions of telephone int…
- Todd Fredson’s translations of francophone African, specifically Ivorian, poetic voices over the past decade mark an important contribution to postcolonial and African studies, not to mention cultural…
- There’s currently a surge of new novels in English by Punjabi authors. Interestingly, many of them, written by upper-caste individuals, depict the caste system and its abuses. Ujjal Dosanjh’s The…
- In Redolent Rush, a recent short fiction collection published by Hawakal, based in New Delhi, India, we have nineteen short stories by Indian authors collected for the purpose of documenting…
- I Narain’s home state of Uttar Pradesh / Reality Images / Adobe Stockt is a grim reality that many important Indian poets are not yet known by the anglophone readers spread across the globe, sadly, be…
- In Love Letters to Ukraine from Uyava (River Paw Press, 2023), Kalpna Singh-Chitnis writes an urgent tribute for Ukraine, the same urgency she employed when putting together her Ukraine antho…
- The Young Man—forthcoming from Seven Stories in September 2023—is Annie Ernaux’s first novel in English translation after receiving the most coveted honor in literature, the Nobel Prize in…
- There is something disconcerting about reading the unpublished poems of a great and passed poet such as Etheridge Knight. After all, these are poems the poet might have deemed unworthy or undesirable…
- Photo by Finan Akbar / UnsplashLife Ceremony (Grove Press, 2022) marks the third translation—once again expertly rendered into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori—of recent works by Sayaka Mur…
- Roman floor mosaic with scene from the Odyssey / Photo by Jamie Heath / FlickrIn Homer, Humanism, Holocaust: Jewish Responses to the Crisis of Enlightenment During World War II (Palg…
- Zuzanna Ginczanka in April 1938 / Muzeum Literatury / East NewsHistory displaced Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–1944) from birth. Born in Kiev a few days after the outbreak of the October 1917 Bolshevik revo…
- Edouard Manet, The Execution of Emperor Maximilian (1868–69), oil on canvas, 252 × 305 cm, Kunsthalle Mannheim / WikipediaPerched grandly and Viennese-pretty on a rocky promontory just north…
- Photo by Kelly Sikkema / UnsplashJem Bendell is a known scholar on societal collapse who rose to prominence in 2018 with his academic paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy…