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In the world we live in, there are things that happen and things that should have occurred according to the simplest and most basic systems of natural evolution. As we [...]

Born in London in 1997, Andrej Al-Asadi is among the foremost young poets writing in Macedonian today. In a conversation with Peter Constantine, he discusses his multicultural background and the [...]

María Sojob, a Tsotsil filmmaker, visited the University of Oklahoma in November 2023 as part of the Mayan Film Festival organized by Carol Rose Little, sponsored in part by WLT. [...]

On September 17, 2024, Invisible Publishing will release Barrack Zailaa Rimas graphic three-volume trilogy, Beirut, available in English for the first time in Carla Calarge and Alexandra Gueydan-Turek's translation. Each [...]

In Gabriel Bump's second novel, The New Naturals, people are seeking safety--safety from violence but also from the perils of capitalism, unsafe drinking water, forest fires, aggressive moose, and creeping [...]

CELEBRATED Danish writer Dorthe Norss first nonfiction book, A Line in the World, translated by Caroline Waight, is a stunning work that documents a year she spent traveling along the [...]

Poetry Editor Lori Martin interviews Kansas Poet Laureate Emeritus Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. Pittsburg State University's Axe Library has recently become the home of the Mirriam-Goldberg Collection. In March 2023, the university [...]

Maria Stepanova is a prizewinning poet and the author of In Memory of Memory, a volume of creative nonfiction that has been recognized with many Russian and European awards and [...]

The following interview with Ada Limón took place shortly after her appointment, in July 2022, as the 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Although I [...]

My amada and I arrived in Barcelona from Paris. We saw from the start the two cities have much in common. Both went through architectural reorganization in the latter nineteenth [...]

Literature can change the way we celebrate. The bull-running and fighting of Spains San Fermin festival was just a local affair before Hemingway brought it worldwide fame in The Sun [...]

A cliché about Oklahoma City and Oklahoma in the national imagination is that it is a place to be passed through. In stories of the Dust Bowl, Oklahoma is a [...]

In the Toronto airport, a young woman moved her bag from a seat so that someone might sit down. 'You can sit here, eh. I'm from Brandon, in 'Friendly Manitoba,' [...]

Yelena Lembersky (b. 1969) grew up in Leningrad at a time when Jews were starting to leave for Israel or the United States--if they could get out. Soviet Jews had [...]

I'm not big on autobiography or memoir. To me they're false forms. It's suspicious when someone writes a memoir. It's as if they are laying down what happened. Whereas what [...]

In Etaf Rum's second novel, Evil Eye, a young Palestinian American artist and mother of two contends with the effects of intergenerational trauma and her complicated relationship with her mother. [...]

The volcano is perhaps no longer just the symbol of social or warlike violence but the metaphor of a real ecological time bomb to come. --Charif Majdalani, 'Dancing at the [...]

I've been thinking about literary imprints lately, and how difficult it is to discern the books of one house from another in commercial publishing. Yet I realized that many of [...]

Javier Fuentes's debut novel, Countries of Origin, finds pastry chef Demetrio leaving the US and returning to his birth country, Spain. On the flight to Madrid, he meets Jacobo, which [...]

I first collaborated with poet Natalie Diaz in 2017, when she wrote the introductory essay for a catalog I edited for Visualizing Language. This Pacific Standard Time-sponsored exhibition brought Oaxacan [...]

Australian novelist Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and immigrated to Australia when she was fourteen. She worked for many years as an editor at Lonely Planet and [...]

Zisis D. Ainalis was born in Athens in 1982. A poet, translator, and essayist, his work has been translated into English, French, Italian, and Portuguese. He lives and works in [...]

Sarah Ladipo Manyika has lived a global story that mirrors that of the protagonists in her recently reissued novel, In Dependence. Ladipo Manyika grew up in northern Nigeria, daughter of [...]

In her novel Minor Detail, Palestinian author Adania Shibli sculpts--with trenchant words--a fragile memorial for a Bedouin girl, murdered and raped in the Negev desert in 1949 (WLT, Summer 2020, [...]

IN THINKING ABOUT this, our fifty-ninth issue, I want to begin with 'Time and Materials,' an essay by Erica Funkhouser that tells the story of an eccentric local figure, B, [...]

Li Zi Shu is the author of the Taiwanese best-seller The Age of Goodbyes, now available in English translation by YZ Chin (Feminist Press, 2022). Q YZ Chin's translation of [...]

We asked writers in Turkey two questions: What is the book, available in English, that best evokes Istanbul? What is a favorite Istanbul bookstore? Here are their answers. A City [...]

I was a comic book fan in the 1970s, when superheroes flew and flashed and skulked and swung across dark city rooftops. Those plots were simple: a bad guy appears, [...]

The following excerpt comes from an interview conducted with Cheyenne author Tommy Orange during the 2019 National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (ncore) in Portland, Oregon. We [...]

Mayyu Ali is a young Rohingya poet, writer, and humanitarian activist who runs the Youth Empowerment Centre in the refugee camp at Cox's Bazaar. He has written many poems and [...]

Grace Chia is the author of the poetry collections womango, Cordelia, and Mother of All Questions, the short-story collection Every Moving Thing That Lives Shall Be Food, and a novel [...]

Born in Morocco in 1961, Youssouf Amine Elalamy is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of nine books, three of which deal with the phenomenon of migration. [...]

AS WORLD LITERATURE TODAY counts down to its centennial year (2026-2027), I'm continually struck by the uncanny vision of our founding editor, Roy Temple House, to launch a quarterly magazine [...]

The impetus for creation is often thought to be love: divine love, parental love, the blessings of cheerful muses. However, love, in all its squidgy warmth, was not the radicle [...]

IN 1907, NEWLY gilded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, Rudyard Kipling traveled to Canada to give whistle-stop lectures across the county. In a private Pullman train car done up [...]

Robin Hemley, ceaseless traveler--or as he calls it, polygamist of place--is the author of fourteen books, former director of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, and founder [...]

SINCE THE INVENTION of the printing press, it's not been uncommon for publishers--whether large international operations like Italy's Rizzoli or small, scrappy independents like Deep Vellum in Dallas, Texas--to decide [...]

Borders have always been a big bone of contention for Italy as a geopolitical entity. For centuries, its territory was fragmented, subdivided into city-states, duchies, seigneuries, run by local and [...]

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 The Displaced: Refugee Writers on [...]

Kathleen Rooney is the author of eight books of poetry, nonaction, and fiction, including the novel O, Democracy! and the novel in poems Robinson Alone. With Eric Plattner, she is [...]

Born to an English mother and a Jamaican-Chinese father, Hannah Lowe is the author of Chick (2013), which celebrates the multicultural life of London and its environs in the 1980s [...]

To introduce the issue that lies ahead, I thought I'd say something about the great themes of domesticity. About how relationships, family, home life, intimate life, just might be the [...]

Time doesn't move, we move, says Tolstoy, but I am standing still in a trolley as it moves through a provincial city in the USSR--a country that no longer exists--in [...]

While in Lincoln to attend the recent Nebraska Book Festival, I sat down with Ted Kooser (b. 1939) to discuss poetry, belief, and tolerance. A former US Poet Laureate Consultant [...]

Simes, Andrew After finishing a master's degree in physics and writing her thesis on the Higgs-Boson particle, Turkish writer Ash Erdogan (b. 1967, Istanbul) worked for two years at CERN [...]

SHARON p. HOLLAND: I am so honored to be sitting down with you to talk a little bit about your work and what inspires you, what motivates you. Tell us [...]

Alan Moore is the most celebrated comics writer living but doesn't write comics anymore. For the past decade, he's been working instead on his second novel, Jerusalem, a sprawling epic [...]

The following excerpt concludes my three-part interview with Carolyn Forché, which took place over the course of the past year and a half and was recorded at three different locations: [...]