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Photo: Kake/FlickrBorn in Enugu, Nigeria, and now dividing his time between Lagos and Berlin, Emeka Ogboh is an artist exploring migration, globalization, and colonialization through sound and foo…
Michelle Johnson
Sigrid Nunez The Friend Riverhead Books D o the books we need find us? A few months ago, I purchased a used copy of Sigrid Nunez’s seventh novel, The Friend. The inside jacket promis…
December 11, 2018As the year’s news of rising nationalistic strains and attacks against the press continued, the urgent need for translation became ever more apparent. More and more, translation across borders embo…
October 31, 2018Photo by Ernesto Rodríguez / Pixabay Robert Con Davis-Undiano’s play about the Day of the Dead premiered in Oklahoma City in October, leading up to the Day of the Dead on Novem…
Photo: Ulf Andersen Author of the noir novel Dragonfish, Vu Tran teaches English and fiction at the University of Chicago. Also a contributor to the collection of essays Th…
Hanif Abdurraqib They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays Two Dollar Radio, 2017 Erica Dawson When Rap Spoke Straight to God: A Poem Tin House, 2018 Virginie Despe…
Photo: Carrie Lou Performing as Lusterlit, Susan Hwang and Charlie Nieland alternate lead vocals and harmonies while supporting each other on guitar, bass, synth, traditional Korean…
April 10, 2018Swedish novelist Therese Bohman is a columnist for Expressen, writing about literature, art, culture, and fashion. The English translation of her debut novel, Drowned, …
photo: joe mazza Kathleen Rooney is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including the novel O, Democracy! and the novel in poems Robinson Alone. With E…
Maureen Freely is currently the president of English PEN and a writer, translator, and the head of the Department of English at the University of Warwick. Freely is the English translator of five n…
December 12, 2017Looking back on 2017, it’s easy to declare the year a success for literary translation, which continued to thrive and move in exciting new directions. Of note, Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey…
Browse: The World in Bookshops Ed. Henry Hitchings Pushkin Press, 2016 Don’t mistake Browse for a collection of breezy tributes to writers’ favorite bookshops. The essays in this lit…
As much as Managing Editor Michelle Johnson loves traveling, she also loves returning home. Her summer reading list reflects a similar course this year. Eli…
December 13, 2016In our fifth annual list of “75 Notable Translations,” we again offer an admittedly incomplete collection of the year’s English translations. And again, we invite you to share your favorites from the…
Petina Gappah Rotten Row Faber & Faber 2016 Petina Gappah’s new collection of stories is named after the street where the criminal courts in Harare sit: Rotten Row, where the powerful…
Lidija Dimkovska. Photo by Tihomir Pinter It’s 1984 and two twelve-year-old sisters are playing a sidewalk game in communist Yugoslavia, only these sisters are unique: they are conjoined twins, joine…
Pay inequality. Sexual assault on college campuses. International acts of misogynistic violence. Sexism at the orchestra conductor’s podium. These and other headlines persist as World Literature T…
With two novels and one book of literary miscellany, WLT managing editor Michelle Johnson’s summer reading list is taking shape. Though she’ll no doubt spend many early morni…
March 28, 2016A Conversation with Donald Molosi In January The Mantle published We Are All Blue, a collection of two plays by the Botswana actor and playwright Donald Molosi, including an introduction…
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,…
July 13, 2015A Warm Welcome to WLT’s New Book Review Editor, Rob Vollmar Rob Vollmar and Marla Johnson The editors of World Literature Today each have a colored editing pencil: mine is purple, o…
Still writing “on this earthquake fault” in San Francisco, feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima continues to create her revolutionary verse. At eighty, aged out of the thirty-under-thirty and forty-under…
July 10, 2014In the middle of the nineteenth century, both Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale traveled in Egypt. Enid Shomer imagined them meeting, and the result is her debut novel, The Twelve Roo…
July 1, 2014This October, Two Lines Press will release Baboon, the first book-length translation of Danish author Naja Marie Aidt. That story collection, Bavian, won the 2008 Nordi…
June 18, 2014Often called Australia’s “queen of the short story,” Cate Kennedy is the award-winning author of novels, poetry, short fiction, and travel memoir. Her…
