All Articles by Date

David Diop’s new novel, At Night All Blood is Black (tr. Anna Moschovakis), combines a war story with allegory and myth. In under 150 pages, the book engages biblical tropes as it takes readers to the bloody trenches of World War I through the troubled account of a Senegalese soldier fighting in the French army. The result is a warning against war and its savage consequences. The book delves into the brutal details of WWI and colonial domination, invoking canonical texts against a...

Disoriented is an online platform that explores identity in Asia through essays, interviews, and multimedia work. Today on WWB Daily, writer and translator Paige Aniyah Morris reflects on the experiences in South Korea that led her to become one of Disoriented's founders. The first time someone in Korea asked me the simple question of how I did my hair, it dawned on me how little language I had to express the most essential, obvious facts about who I was here. In the two years...

Elisa Taber's An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country is out today with 11:11 Press. A lyric ethnography of two Paraguayan populations—a Mennonite colony and a Nivaklé settlement—the book blends fiction, observation, and myth. In the excerpt below, an evangelical pastor, Padre Pedro, describes a dystopic future. A Sermon The sky will refuse to seep water. The land will grow as hard as stone. Animals will bury themselves the way only reptiles do...

Our November 2020 issue, the second part of our double issue of writing on the climate crisis that began last month, coincides with an inauspicious date: as of November 4, 2020, Donald Trump has made official the United States’ breach of its commitment to the landmark 2015 Paris accord on climate change, the second time in two decades that the US agreed to and then failed to honor its commitments to an international climate pact. The protagonist of this month’s work is, by and...

Human and natural tragedy intersect in Isabel Zapata's poem about the Richard Russell Horizon Air incident and mother orca Tahlequah's thousand-mile journey with her dead calf. © Isabel Zapata. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2020 by Robin Myers. All rights reserved.

Eliseu Cavalcante's Being Mangrove/Ser Manguezal series was inspired by Josué de Castro's book Of Men and Crabs from 1967. De Castro was a Brazilian geographer, physician, writer, and activist against world hunger. In his book, men are envisioned as crabs, learning to walk in the mangroves. A common theme across the work of Cavalcante, who has also photographed the indigenous and river communities of the Amazon, is the symbiotic relationship between...

In this excerpt from his novel Quantas madrugadas tem a noite (How many dawns has the night), Ondjaki gives us a farcical view of urban catastrophe provoked by human folly. Then lemme take a step back to fill you in on the whole business: we started with the tick because now I know it came from the tick, but nobody knew at the time, you get my drift? Take it easy, there’s no confusion, there’s a whole bunch of different confusions: first, the dead man had...

In this excerpt from her novel Tsunami Blues, Markéta Pilátová traces the reverberations of the December 2004 tsunami in Indonesia back to the Czech Republic. Music for the old lady Small Town Moravia, December 26, 2004 His memories, his “pictures from the tropics,” included these kinds of images, too. This was how they ran from hurricanes, back in Cuba such a long time ago, or from surreal, torrential rains that would flush away most of...

Yu Jian composes an elegy to a majestic elephant as it marches across Asia. Rising above the land, it precedes the grayness of Asia.   A robed king, boundless and lost, stands at the edge of Xishuangbanna and Laos.  It’s the jungle’s shield. The Creator bestows its symbolism, endowing it with a face of grief, hiding diamonds behind its blue eyelids; imitating crescent moons to shape its tusks, keeping palm-leaf manuscripts secret in its wrinkles. Huge...

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 Mexico City as you feel/see it? Mexico City always wears a mask, alternating between festive and melancholic. But these masks don’t match the city’s mood; they’re often deceptive. The masks are part of the city,...

Mercedes Barcha is best known for her marriage of nearly sixty years to Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez. Today, on what would have been her eighty-eighth birthday, Felipe Restrepo Pombo turns the spotlight from Gabo to Mercedes, remembering her strength of character, devotion to friends and family, and often-underrecognized contribution to her husband's work.  There are those—whether friends, acquaintances, or...

In his forthcoming book On Time and Water, an excerpt of which appears in our October 2020 Climate issue, and in his TED talk, Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason combines science, myth, and autobiography to depict the terrible cost of the climate crisis. In a recent conversation via email, Magnason spoke with WWB about the future of glaciers and the role of literature in climate activism. This interview has been edited. WWB: How did you turn to writing about the...

They’ve read and admired one another for ages, but they’d never had an occasion to talk to each other. Emmanuel Carrère and Daniel Mendelsohn are among those writers who, over the past decade, have most profoundly impacted first-person nonfiction—literature itself, in short. The former did so with The Adversary, A Russian Novel, Lives Other Than My Own, Limonov, and The Kingdom; the latter with The Elusive Embrace, The Lost, and An Odyssey. Now that their new books...

This new anthology of Vietnamese short stories, published by Columbia University Press, unites twenty diverse voices from contemporary Vietnamese literature on the topic of the American military action in the country. While the war officially ended in 1975, Other Moons' narratives demonstrate its enduring consequences in Vietnamese life and thinking. Published in English translation for the first time, these works offer a fresh perspective on the conflict that took place between...

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.  From Valancourt Books | The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories, Vol. 1 by James D. Jenkins and Ryan Cagle (editors), translated from multiple languages by multiple translators | Fiction | 420 pages | ISBN 9781948405645 | US$19.99 What the publisher says: “For this groundbreaking volume, the first of its kind, the editors of...

In A Pre-Columbian Bestiary: Fantastic Creatures of Indigenous Latin America, Ilan Stavans collaborates with illustrator Eko to tell the stories of religious and mythical creatures from various Indigenous cultures of Latin America. In the excerpt below, Stavans describes Tepeyólotl, the Aztec god of earthquakes. Tepeyólotl (teh-peh-yoh-loh-tl, Aztec) This is the god of echoes and earthquakes. The word is derived from the Nahuatl words tepētl...

When Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher won the 2020 Amazon.ca First Novel Award (formerly the Books in Canada First Novel Award), it was the first translated novel selected in the prize’s forty-four-year history. Originally released as Le plongeur in 2016, the novel has won multiple awards, including Quebec’s prestigious Bookseller’s Award and the international Prix Senghor. Le plongeur, and now The Dishwasher, have also attracted an unusually broad and loyal...

Girls Against God, the latest novel from Norwegian writer and musician Jenny Hval, came out earlier this month with Verso Books. Translated by Marjam Idriss, the novel blends experimental horror, feminist theory, and reflections on magic, music, and art. In the excerpt below, the protagonist describes her first meeting with the women who will become her band members. The word BAND is quite similar to the word BOND. Have you thought about that? A band is a bond between people. A...

Tang Fei (the pen name of Wang Jing) was born in 1983 in Shanghai. She is well known as a writer of science fiction and fantasy and is also a literary critic and essayist. Tang Fei was one of our star interviewees in Paper Republic's collection Chinese Women Writers Speak, 2020, in which we asked women to share their experiences of being (and becoming) writers in China. Here, Tang Fei reflects on recent changes in the literary landscape, entrenched gender stereotypes, and the...

Egyptian writer Haytham El Wardany's The Book of Sleep, translated from Arabic by Robin Moger, is out today with Seagull Books. Throughout the book, and in the four fragments below, El Wardany blends genres, drawing on philosophy, poetry, and narrative to interrogate the nature of sleep. Anonymous Night falls and the earth turns. A world departs and another appears. In this other world, the dark blots out features, dulls edges, softens boundaries; it repairs what the...

We're pleased to welcome Varun Nayar as a WWB editorial fellow. Varun is a writer, editor, and researcher from Delhi, India. He was most recently the nonfiction editor of Asymptote, and has written for publications including Pacific Standard, Himal Southasian, and National Geographic Traveller India. He currently works at the Museum of Art & Photography, Bengaluru, as well as at WWB. Varun spoke with us about his relationship to...

In the early 1980s, Mexico was bailed out of a foreign debt crisis by the IMF and the World Bank so that it could continue paying back interest on loans from US banks. The condition for this financial relief was a set of sweeping structural adjustments which, under the banner of neoliberalism, created the perfect storm of conditions that, in the decades to come, would facilitate the rise of the modern Mexican cartels, and consequently, the border crisis with the US. In Grieving: Dispatches...

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 Athens as you feel/see it? Sweet anarchy. Athens is about instant decisions, constant change, boldness and confusion and nerve. Parthenon makes Athenians feel imperfect, inadequate, creating and recreating a longing for...

As I write, the West Coast of the US is ravaged by wildfires; the Gulf Coast, still recovering from Hurricane Laura, braces for Hurricane Sally’s potential destruction; an enormous chunk of Greenland’s icecap has broken free; the Northern Hemisphere has sweated through the hottest summer on record—and that’s just today. Temperatures swing between extremes, violent weather becomes the norm. In this daunting context, we present a double issue of writing on...

Father wants to teach me to conjure water with his staff, like he does. This is his gift, and he wants it to be mine. Every morning, the same thing. The scene is reiterated on the slope in front of the house: “Take the staff,” he tells me, “trust me, it doesn’t bite, now lift it and stroke the earth, don’t think about water, if you think of what you want to achieve, the thing will slip away from you.” But the thing always gets away from me. We’ve...