An artist adds color to a building in a Delhi alleyway. Photo by Vikram Singh.
The twenty-first century has seen Delhi go from being just another nondescript capital city to a throbbing…
ESSAYS
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer Recent fiction by Junot Díaz, Paul Kingsnorth, and Ali Smith offers an emergent project for contemporary world literature by yoking the his…
Ghassan Zaqtan (left) and Mahmoud Darwish in a 2007 photo taken by Palestinian poet Bashir Shalash. After presenting a sweeping landscape of Arabic poetry since pre-Islamic days…
A Bangladeshi writer traces his quest to dodge the external and internal censors and considers what fiction at its best can do: “sail past all censors to uncover the tender and transgres…
Members of the Sheffield, UK–based performance company Forced Entertainment on stage in And on the Thousandth Night at the Hebbel am Ufer performance center in Berlin. Photo: Hugo Glendi…
Syrian artist Issam Kourbaj created Unearthed (in Memoriam) (2014) out of repurposed book covers. He calls the work “a quiet gesture, an archive to remember those who have been forg…
Photo by Raul Lieberwirth The great games will be remembered for a lifetime, just as we cannot give up on our failures, either. The muscles record the beautiful strokes; the pos…
After meeting at a short-fiction conference, Adnan Mahmutović and Lucy Durneen began talking to one another about his childhood love of comics and his efforts to preserve them during the Bosnian…
The following excerpt is from The Last Soldiers of the Cold War, by Fernando Morais, forthcoming Verso Books (on sale wherever books are sold on June 16, 2015). Roberto Fernández Retamar…
Photo by Yuri Numerov Writers from those parts of the world where democracy has for too long remained an unfulfilled dream cannot be apolitical. Over the years, as media freedom…
Photo by Neil Craver Andrés Felipe Solano tackles fiction in his novels and facts in his journalism—as a writer, he alternates between the real and the imaginary. Of course, tha…
Photo by Francis Bijl/Flickr World culture today is developing amid expanding globalization, which means that national literatures appear to develop more and more similar featur…
Bruno Montané Krebs.Photo by Esther Taboada To complement “Mapping Life through Poetry,” his interview that appears in the November 2014 print edition of WLT, Ryan Long offers the follow…
The opening lines of Lea Goldberg’s poem “A god once commanded us,” from Found in Translation: Modern Hebrew Poets (2006), tr. Robert Friend, ed. Gabriel Levin. Israeli poetry of protest…
Photo by Jonathan Adami In our hyperdigital era, mass reading events provide opportunities for human interact…
Photo by Lotus Carroll/Flickr To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.Octavio Paz Writing…
Illustration adapted from Nikki Pugh/Flickr With bookstores and the publishing world in crisis, could ads within books be the answer? Victoria’s Secret in Pride and Prejudi…
Written in the wake of the Barcelona Olympics, Eduard Màrquez’s Zugzwang reflects the tensions of a culture straining against its minor status with aspirations toward a cosmopolitan outlo…- Photo by luipermom/Flickr Computational reading puts us in touch with an exploratory way of engaging with language, with how we use words and how we arrive at their meanings. It…
- In an address to the Yale Political Union on April 23, 2013, Meena Alexander began with a line from Shelley’s 1821 essay, “A Defence of Poetry.” The resolution—“Poets are the unacknowledged legisl…
- American exceptionalism makes us believe we are extraordinary. Consequently, we trust our literature is outstanding as well. Truth is, we are as narrow as everyone else, and our literature showcas…
- By Peter Groth (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0],via Wikimedia Commons This essay is adapted from Leonardo Padura’s November 2012 speech in Havana, Cuba, at the Casa de las Améri…
- Having just spent a year in Berlin, novelist Claire Messud reports on her observations in and around the city. “In Berlin,” she writes, “a sense of becoming trumps a sense of bel…
- The Arab Spring may have destroyed the perception that Arab cultures are inherently incompatible with democracy and the values of freedom, but writers of Muslim extraction who are politically and…
- Photo by Pesis/FLIKR Under the sign of the bicycle, writers and riders share a special affinity. Alon Raab offers a global literary tour. Bicycles: because lo…