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Presented here for the first time in English, the cult writer Charles Chahwan—"Lebanon's answer to Charles Bukowski"—tells a tale of rival militiamen euphoric with violence.   Under the gentle afternoon sunlight, Serge’s body appeared limp and more slouched than usual as he rested against the back seat of the shared taxi, a Morris Princess. He was the sole passenger in the service as it made its way down the coastal highway, as if other potential...

The following is excerpted from Stone Dreams, one of the three novellas that make up Akram Aylisli’s Farewell, Aylis, translated by Katherine E. Young and out next week with Academic Studies Press. In Stone Dreams, an actor explores the limits of one man’s ability to live a moral life amid conditions of sociopolitical upheaval, ethnic cleansing, and petty professional intrigue.   Dedicated to the memory of my fellow countrymen, who left us their unwept pain Chapter...

Anton Hur, translator of Kyung-Sook Shin’s The Court Dancer and Kang Kyeong-ae’s The Underground Village, offers insights into the challenges facing literary translators and tips for navigating “the Valley.”   There’s a name for that dangerous period in the beginning stages of a company where there’s money going out but none coming in: the Valley of Death. It is described in this way because many companies go bankrupt at this stage, not...

In the title story of Yu Hua’s The April 3rd Incident: Stories, the narrator hears his family and friends whispering about something that will happen on April 3rd. There is no reason to suspect that this event is any more nefarious than a birthday party, but the narrator immediately starts entertaining ominous thoughts about the conversation he has overheard. The sense of a plot against him becomes so intense that he ends up leaving his hometown on a train. His destination is not...

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 Hong Kong as you feel/see it? The mood of Hong Kong is low and is getting lower, strangely. Sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes it’s depressed. At other times, it suffers from adjustment disorder, unable to adapt itself to...

WWB contributing writer Francesca Pellas spoke with Italian writer Paolo Cognetti about his novel The Eight Mountains, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre and published this year by Atria Books. His most recent novel, Senza mai arrivare in cima: Viaggio in Himalaya, was published in Italy this week by Einaudi. An abridged version of this interview appeared in Italian in Finzioni magazine.   There is a secret that every person who has grown up in the mountains...

­ The Naked Woman is out today with the Feminist Press. When it was originally published in 1950, critics doubted a woman writer could be responsible for its shocking erotic content. In Armonía Somers’s searing critique of Enlightenment values, fantastic themes are juxtaposed with brutal depictions of misogyny and violence, and frantically build to a fiery conclusion. Finally available to an English-speaking audience, Armonía Somers will resonate with readers of...

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every other month. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For November’s installment, Laura Esther Wolfson passed the baton to Ellen Cassedy, who translates from Yiddish.   What is your connection to the language you translate from? Yiddish was the language that my Jewish forebears spoke in kitchens, marketplaces, and...

This selection of writings is by no means or intention a full and general picture of Vietnamese literature. The reading choice returns/moves toward the presences, the ruins, and the enduring silences of writers-in-between, the hyphenated writers, the writers who hide themselves, the writers of unshareable struggles. The past, the present of the past, the present. North, South, the North in South, the South in North. Inside and outside. Here and there. Vietnamese and English. The fallen and...

In Ariel Urquiza's short story, a young man is forced to deliver drugs on his mother's behalf, but after arriving at his clients' party, he finds little motive for celebration.   “What do you want?” Gabriel asked when he opened the door. “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Renata’s son.” “Wow, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten so big, you’re almost as tall as me. Come on in. It took you a while, I was just...

Marcin Wicha discovers that choosing the right urn for his father's ashes is a process fraught with nightmarish options that could wake even the dead. “Please choose an extension number or wait to be transferred to the front office,” and the voice of Louis Armstrong on the phone:                             And I think to myself,                    ...

The author remembers how his father asked for American cookies from the hospital bed, and how, after a tumor claimed his life, no one ate the oranges in the garden.     In memory of José João Serrano Peixoto   The day begins to stir and things around me begin to stir a little also. I open the shutters. The flowers in the vases lift themselves toward the slender light that bathes them. The light skims low over the earth, like a plague stretching...

In Mishka Lavigne’s play Haven, the famous writer Gabrielle Sauriol has died in a car accident on the Pacific coast. Her only survivor is her adult daughter, Elsie. In this scene, Elsie attends her mother's funeral.   ELSIE Funeral home. I’m in mourning. That’s what one says, right? That’s what one says. My sincere condolences. Thank you. My most sincere condolences. Thank you. All my sympathy. Thank you. Condooooolences. Thank youuuuu. Sincere . ....

In a sleepless night, an old man remembers how he and his wife have spent a lifetime speaking the language of feet.   One sleepless night typical of the old and insomniac, Mr. Thuyết suddenly remembers the eyes of his daughter when she was three or four years old. For decades, he has kept that evening in near-complete oblivion without once recalling the eyes of the child who was always attached to him, the eyes of the child who would lie with her head in his arms,...

In the US, Thanksgiving is this month’s major holiday, but for others November opens with the second and third days of the celebration known collectively as the Day of the Dead. Those days—Halloween, All Saints’ Day (that much-missed, exquisitely timed holiday for Catholic trick-or-treaters), and All Souls’ Day—prompt our consideration of the departed, as well as contemplation of our own mortality. We’re marking the holiday with writing that explores...

A Different Context I first came to know another side of Vietnamese poetry, outside of the formal education system, through “virtual encounters” and friends in distant places, writers and works on internet forums like Talawas, Tiền Vệ, Evan, Gió-O, Hợp Lưu, Tạp Chí Thơ, and overseas Vietnamese publications passed from hand to hand between friends inside the country. The circulation of these publications over many years even now...

A piece of furniture in an unusual location sparks a series of interrogations.      a velvet chair             standing by itself                         on a highway a chair standing by itself on a highway             means its life is over a life of ups and downs             before it was...

A Vietnamese woman visiting her ex-husband's family in Denmark remembers the many men she's loved in her life.    At fourteen I fell in love with a man, a writer, older than me by thirteen years, already with a family. He resembled a young Anthony Perkins, that guitar-playing wanderer who roams the forest and happens upon the doe eyes of Audrey Hepburn in the foliage. At twenty-one I lost my virgin body to a person who specialized in the old lục bát...

What begins as a meditation on love soon meanders past a lighthouse, past an ox with broken horns, until it reaches consciousness.    1 Love I liberate the captive herd within me I summon back the fossilized kisses 2 If things have souls then things bear static souls 3 Hungry birds are building nests in space Affliction gathers in the handkerchief of a bride on her wedding day 4 We kidnap fear by the sharp-edged tongue of a knife 5 The sound of your crying purifies the...

Trần Dần’s novel, Crossroads and Lampposts, is set in Hanoi in late 1954 and 1955, immediately following the withdrawal of the French and the takeover by the Viet Minh under the terms of the Geneva Accords. Duong, the main character in the novel, is under suspicion of being a collaborator with the former French regime. In this excerpt from chapter three, Trinh (aka Com), Duong’s wife, talks about life under the new regime and her husband’s state of mind....

These translated, cut-up and reassembled Vietnamese texts are by Nguyễn-Hoàng Quyên, originals by Nguyễn Quốc Chánh (“Syndrome,” “Fucking Skulls Open”), Bùi Giáng (“Sương Tỳ Hải”), and Nhã Thuyên (“taste of waters”).   birds one by one penetrates a gap, disappearing wings disappearing songs, beaks remain, cut open one another’s eyes, napes, death...

In this surrealistic piece, a sleeping man wakes up to find a visitor watching him.    He comes to find me on a day I don’t remember, by the time I’ve gotten up he is already sitting on the other side of the table to watch as I eat my breakfast. He does not say a word as I stir the coffee, the spoon’s collision with the side of the glass making a dispassionate clang. I’ve been sleeping for a while, not sure how long a while, he must have arrived as I...

When Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, invited Dubravka Ugresic to serve as a guest lecturer in the fall of 1991, the timing was fortuitous, to say the least. Ugresic’s homeland, Croatia, was caught up at that time in a virulent nationalist movement that demanded independence from the crumbling Yugoslav Socialist Republic and was part of a surge of separatist insurgencies which would soon lead the whole region into open conflict. In the following years, the Yugoslav wars...

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 Melbourne as you feel/see it? When you wake up early in this big city, the first thing you often see in the vast sky is masses of hot air balloons: it makes me feel faithful to the day, and I imagine myself surrounded by citizen...

In this bimonthly series, “Best of the B-Sides,” critic and bookseller Lori Feathers recommends a new work in translation along with a number of backlist (“B-Side”) titles that you might have missed.   Certain secrets weigh heavy on those who carry them. Many times these dark secrets metastasize—their consequences reverberate beyond the secret’s participants and are passed down to subsequent generations. Each of the novels recommended in...