Hélène Dorion / Photo by Maxime G. Delisle / helenedorion.com Hélène Dorion is a major figure of contemporary French-Canadian literature. Foremost a poet, she is known for her deep connection…

Akiyuki Nosaka / Wikipedia Akiyuki Nosaka’s (1930–2015) semi-autobiographical short story “Hotaru No Haka” (Grave of the Fireflies) is a searing portrayal of war, hunger, and the desperate str…

Noam Chomsky / Photo by Sam Usner / Haymarket Books While A Livable Future Is Possible (Haymarket Books, 2024 / Penguin Books, 2025) may be one of the most timidly worded titles…

Carlie Hoffman  I have never been able to hear music in my voice so much as I have in reading the lyrical wonder of One More World Like This World (Four Way Books, 2025),…

The title of Xiaolu Guo’s new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle (Chatto & Windus, 2025), instantly reminds us of the famous opening of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “Call me Ishm…

Nancy Berg and Marc Saperstein, Exile and the Jews: Literature, History, and Identity (Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press…

Photo of Arturo Fontaine by Daniel Mordzinski / Courtesy of Agencia Literaria Carmen Balcells In Y entonces Teresa (And then Teresa) (Catalonia, 2024), Arturo Fontaine (b. 1…

Photo of José Luís Peixoto by Patricia Santos Pinto / Courtesy of MertinWitt Literarische Agentur Born in 1974 in the parish of Galveias, Portugal—in the southern region of Alentejo—José Luís Marqu…

There is a kind of natural unraveling in Kiriti Sengupta’s poetry that, while complex, feels as effortless as the silence after separation: provocatively serene as a Tagorean sketch, as playful as wor…

Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his 1813 lecture On the Different Methods of Translating, famously proposed that translators face two paths: to “leave the author in peace and move the reader tow…

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay (1894–1950) was an acclaimed Indian novelist and short-story writer who wrote in Bangla. His international fame mostly rests on the popularity of his novels Pather Pan…

Carroll Beauvais / Photo courtesy of carrollbeauvais.com As a trauma therapist, I felt a deep chord strike inside of me while reading Carroll Beauvais’s debut collection of poems, …

Mohammed Choukri’s book Faces has finally been published in an exquisite translation by Jonas Elbousty. Published by Georgetown University Press, this translation is a continuation of th…

Melissa Weininger’s Beyond the Land: Diaspora Israeli Culture in the Twenty-First Century (Wayne State University Press, 2023) is a thought-provoking and hopeful book. Written during the…

Photo of Poniatowska by Pedrobautista – Own work, CC BY 3.0 Las siete cabritas (2000), the literal translation of which would be “The Seven Little Female Goats,” is the original…

Published in 2023, The Age of Lonelinesses is Asaad Zohrabi’s debut novel. Born in 1978 in Ravansar, Kermanshah, Iran, Zohrabi has already released four volumes of poetry. His first…

A centennial celebration of poet Nissim Ezekiel compiled by his daughter, poet Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, Nissim Ezekiel, Poet and Father (Pippa Rann Books, 2024) consists of a collection…

Photo by Laurin Rinder / Adobe Stock Abdilatif Abdallah (b. 1946, Mombasa) is a major Swahili poet who was, until recently, largely unknown to English readers. A beautiful volume of his work,…

Photo of Hon Lai Chu by Jeffy Lau In Hon Lai Chu’s newly translated novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines, 2025), intimacy becomes a matter of state policy. The Conjoinment Act, a fict…

Cho Yeo-jeong in Parasite (2019), dir. Bong Joon Ho / Courtesy of IMDB If you have ever taken a writing class in Europe or North America (aka the West), you have likely heard abo…

Amanda Hess / Photo by Loreto Caceres / Wikipedia If you have not yet read the writing of Amanda Hess, you have been depriving yourself of the most insightful commentary on our times. Hess wri…

Photo by Ignacio Gallego / Flickr In the pantheon of modern Greek poets, Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990) stands out for his poetic renown as much as for the effigies and exiles of himself and his po…

Photo by Alexandros Giannakakis on Unsplash Strange Pictures (HarperVia, 2025) is the first book released in English by the mysterious and cryptic best-selling Japanese author Uketsu. This…

Photo by Kit Leong / Adobe Stock Those who have not suffered trauma directly tend to think of it as an event. It is not. Trauma is an atmosphere; trauma terraforms, creates a new world in whic…

Like many other Ukrainian writers since 2022, Ostap Slyvynsky has answered a unique call of duty, one of cultural and lexicographical preservation. In his compilation A Ukrainian Dictionary o…