June, 2020 The City and the Writer: In Paris with Marilyn Hacker (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | June 19, 2020 If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Paris as you feel/see it? Something is always about to happen, and it somehow always has a history, and a resemblance to something that happened before: whether it’s a general strike, a heat wave, a trial, a football match, the... notes from this city (Magazine) By Carolina Pihelgas | June 19, 2020 Carolina Pihelgas maps a city emptied by coronavirus. notes from this city, which pants around me like a prehistoric beast. its skeleton juts from the riverside brush and the framework of buildings that crop up on the banks, wind flapping in their sheeted windows. its movement is fairly steady and silent, and yet careless, rooftops glinting, trees towering in the parks like obelisks. with each day, the view from the window is increasingly my own gaze, telling me more of what is... The Translator Relay: Kristin Dykstra (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | June 17, 2020 WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For June's installment, Urayoán Noel passed the baton to Kristin Dykstra, who translates from Spanish to English. What is your connection to the language(s) you translate from and/or the place(s) where the books... The Right to Identity: The Queer Issue (Magazine) By Susan Harris | June 16, 2020 Pride Month and our annual Queer issue arrive at a time of grief and rage. Already ravaged by the pandemic and the resulting financial devastation, the US erupted in fury over the brutal murder of George Floyd by police, protests which were soon duplicated around the world. As these three crises—health, economic, and racial justice—spur communities to take to the streets and demand action, we are reminded that Pride celebrations themselves grew out of the protests spearheaded by... Elfiye (Magazine) By Nazli Karabiyikoglu | June 16, 2020 A couple takes a drastic step after discovering their daughter’s relationship with another woman in this short story by Nazli Karabiyikoglu. I. Elfiye was planning to invite her friend over at some point, which she more or less had to do, actually. Pelin had lured her into it by asking all those questions about her family, and now she was caught in her trap. Elfiye waited a week, putting Pelin off until the day her stepmother met with her friends to give each other gold. These Gold... The Man with a Thousand Names (Magazine) By R. Joseph Dazo | June 16, 2020 A man’s unusual tattoos attract international attention in this short story by R. Joseph Dazo. The first question most of them ask when they see my skin is “Why?” I often respond with a smile. Sometimes, my face turns hot. I can’t figure out if I’m annoyed or embarrassed. When I try to answer, I stutter, unable to finish a phrase so that they’ll understand. My armpits dampen. My forehead sweats. How I want to say to them, “This is art. This has... Ricardo and Vânia (Magazine) By Chico Felitti | June 16, 2020 In this nonfiction excerpt, Chico Felitti tells the story of two Brazilian makeup artists who became famous for their radically altered appearances. The cemetery in São Bento, Araraquara, has a grave with no name. It’s the second tombstone in the fourth block on the left, if you walk in through the gate by the coconut-water stand. The family of the man buried there can't afford the R$140 (about $30) it takes to have a grave marker installed. But the man whose ashes rest... Eight Meters (Magazine) By Juan Carlos Cortázar | June 16, 2020 A man tries to honor his dead lover’s final wish in this short story by Juan Carlos Cortázar. You went back to him. The last months of his life, that’s how he said it, no embellishment. You went back—a year earlier you’d been the one to leave, you’re a piece of shit, you’d shouted—and the two of you made up. If it were HIV, even, he’d have more of a chance, but with this, no, nothing, a few months and that’s it, he said, and you... Six Musical Moments by Schubert (Magazine) By Natalia Rubanova | June 16, 2020 A queer love triangle revolves around the music of Schubert in this short story by Natalia Rubanova. Intermezzo Annette sneaks: got to be quiet, quiet as a mouse, a mouse! Careless, better to keep to the left, the left, no pillows there—c u r i o u s: is he really sleeping or just pretending, and if he is, God have mercy, again? Annette tries not to think—not to think about that. Annette knows—there, in the silver Honda, decorating the darkness with all... Gay Giant (Graphic Lit) By Gabriel Ebensperger | June 16, 2020 Have you ever had the feeling that even if you wanted to, you’d never blend in? Ha Seong-nan’s “Bluebeard’s First Wife” Gives the Old Tale of Patriarchy a New Twist (Book Reviews) By Reviewed by Hannah Weber | June 15, 2020 An angry lone shooter wanders through the mist into town, bullets clinking. A woman sits bolt upright in the back of a taxi going the wrong way on an unlit road. A detective stumbles through the woods, dodging the searchlights of night poachers. In Ha Seong-nan’s new short story collection, Bluebeard’s First Wife, darkness and fog turn farmers’ fields and city suburbs into places of hidden horrors. These eleven stories use shock and horror to dissect contemporary... The Complete WWB Decameron (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | June 12, 2020 A little over ten weeks ago, as borders were closing and our world convulsed in the COVID-19 pandemic, we asked ourselves how we could join together with our readers for solace, stimulation, and contact with a wider world. We drew inspiration (as we often do) from literature: in this case, Giovanni Boccaccio’s classic Decameron, in which ten posh Florentines hole up in a villa as the Black Death ravages their city. To pass the time and keep up morale in their Renaissance-era... Pandemic Diary (Magazine) By Ricardo Romero | June 12, 2020 In contemplative diary entries, Ricardo Romero records life in a locked-down Buenos Aires. 1. And suddenly, with the prospect of these days where the unreality of our daily lives cracks open to reveal the reality of the details (the parts, the fractions are clear but not the whole: the whole is hardly the story we need, the law of gravity that prevents our world from dispensing of us), suddenly, then, we discover that making a bed, turning on a stove, regulating the temperature of the... In Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs,” Oppression and Dissent Begin at Women’s Bodies (Book Reviews) By Reviewed by Saba Ahmed | June 10, 2020 Reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs under lockdown is a particularly strange (and estranging) experience, since so much of the novel is concerned with a heightened awareness of the decaying female body, loneliness, and the passage of time. Looking up from a page to re-immerse yourself in real time, then engaging again with the particular texture of Kawakami’s prose, her descriptions of suburban Tokyo and Osaka in which years unspool within the space of a few pages, is a... Translating (in) Darkness (WWB Daily) By Lara Vergnaud | June 10, 2020 How do we translate trauma? In this essay, Lara Vergnaud reflects on her experience translating scenes of graphic violence and abuse, and shares strategies that may be useful to other translators. I almost turned this translation down. The book was too dark, too violent, too graphic. And yet, I kept reading. It’s set in rural France, sometime in the nineteenth century. Rose is fourteen when she is sold by her father to a rich landowner. She is raped, repeatedly, and gets... 8 Queer Books in Translation to Read This Pride Month (WWB Daily) By Words Without Borders | June 8, 2020 This year, Pride Month comes at a momentous and grief-stricken time. As queer communities around the world take to the streets in the fight for racial justice, many are also working to raise awareness of the full spectrum of queer experience, including its intersections with race, class, culture, and more. We asked eight indie presses to help us spotlight queer books in translation from all over the world. The resulting list features work from Equatorial Guinea to Peru to... What We Lost: COVID-19 Beyond the Numbers (Magazine) By Hideo Furukawa and Kathleen McCaul Moura | June 5, 2020 Introduction: Megacity Lockdown Coronavirus has thrived in megacities, determined to make it in the big smoke of the world’s densest urban hubs. It was in industrial Wuhan, now the most infamous megacity of them all, where tightly packed tower-block residents first showed signs of a new lung infection. New York and London, superstar cities, meccas for tourists, are now epicenters not of culture but mortality. The virus spread easily on their densely packed transport networks, their... Tiananmen 1989: Our Shattered Hopes (Graphic Lit) By Lun Zhang and Adrien Gombeaud and Améziane | June 4, 2020 Not a day goes by that I don't go back to Tiananmen Square. The Unsettled Sound of the Landscape (WWB Daily) By Itamar Vieira Junior | June 3, 2020 The wind was strong, and the clothes hanging all along the barbed wire fence began to fall. From the doorway, she saw the violent path of the leaves and the dirt swept along the ground. They ran, returned, wandered without a destination. Next it was the birds that moved about, agitated, shredding the sky with their disoriented forays and sheltering in the lower branches. The hens sought out their perches, as if they expected night to fall. Day had broken a few hours before, enough light... The City and the Writer: In Delhi with Sudeep Sen (WWB Daily) By Nathalie Handal | June 1, 2020 If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Can you describe the mood of Delhi as you feel/see it? A city as ancient as Delhi is always going through a churning, a slow-motion flux that records subtle changes on its terrain with the precision of barometric instruments. This is a city that was conquered... May, 2020 Spring Cleaning (Magazine) By Yishai Sarid | May 29, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic prompts a middle-aged woman to reconnect with a part of her past in this short story by Yishai Sarid. I remember almost nothing about him. So many people have passed through my life since then, and he was no more than a marginal episode, a transient character. I never paid him any real attention before. And yet here I am, thirty years later, going to meet him. I recall the way he addressed me in one of his old letters: “My love, my gorgeous.” I may have... The Watchlist: May 2020 (WWB Daily) By Tobias Carroll | May 28, 2020 Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about. From Open Letter | Four By Four by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore | Fiction | 230 pages | ISBN 9781948830140 | US$15.95 What the publisher says: “An exploration of the relationship between the powerful and powerless—and the repetition of these patterns—Mesa’s ‘sophisticated... Peripatetics: The Essays of Jazmina Barrera, Karen Villeda, and Mariana Oliver (Magazine) By Charlotte Whittle | May 27, 2020 Last spring in Mexico City seems an eternity ago. The jacarandas were blooming. Each morning I would rise early, salute the raucous purple blossoms on the tree outside the window, brew coffee, then return to bed and read, while my companion, a large, gangly, deaf white cat named Cirilo kneaded my legs. I read mostly nonfiction by Mexican women who wrote with what I came to describe as an itinerant sensibility—essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and... Özdamar’s Tongue (Magazine) By Mariana Oliver | May 27, 2020 Mariana Oliver reflects on the intertwined relationship of language and migration in this essay about Turkish writer Emine Özdamar. In my language, tongue means language. The tongue does not have bones: it twists in the direction we twist it in. I sat tongue twisted in the city of Berlin. —Emine Sevgi Özdamar She moved to West Berlin at eighteen to work in one of the factories. Eyes accustomed to the colors of Istanbul; dark, thick hair. Though she wasn’t one for... Visegrád (Magazine) By Karen Villeda | May 27, 2020 Karen Villeda tracks her journey through Eastern Europe in microessays that blend poetry and prose. Micro is the diminutive for something very small or a prefix derived from the Greek μ (mikró), meaning “small”: as in microelectronics, microscope, microcast, micrococcus,... Page 1 of 220 pages 1 2 3 > Last ›
