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. . . like a premonition of eternity. – Xavier Bordes
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ost writers and—by extension—artists take the brute facts of existence as a starting point, then fashion their work with vary…
Daniel Simon
That the ears might hear what the eyes can’t see.– Monchoachi From vinyl collections to mixtapes to digital playlists, music aficionados have always curated their favorites alongside bookshe…
How does one become a writer? For German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, it was less epiphany than the gradual accretion of circumstance and intention. Here is what she told Haaretz in 2011: “I tu…
Not only is World Literature Today one of the oldest continuously published magazines devoted to international literature, but a remarkable continuity has prevailed on our masthead page in th…
The Art of Death Edwidge Danticat Graywolf Press (2017) It might seem odd to focus on a book called The Art of Death as spring approaches (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), but we all know about t…
Well, Lord, this / infinitesimal speckcould fill the universe with praise. – Marilyn Nelson, “The Dimensions of the Milky Way” W hen Marilyn Nelson delivered her keynote talk, “Bow…-
Thou shall not be a perpetrator; thou shall not be a victim; and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander.– Yehuda Bauer Just this morning, as I began drafting my note for the current i…
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The project advanced by this forum is urgent: individually and collectively to contest the pitched, pervasive, pernicious intolerance of our age. – H. L. Hix, “Belief in an Age of Intolerance…
Harvey Dunn, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, 1926 / Courtesy South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, South Dakota For more, read two new poems by Ted Kooser. While in Lincoln to attend the r…
Every story had a face, a first and last name, a mother or son, brother or sister, losses and days of triumph.– Leonora Flis, “Zeroes” The haunting photograph on the cover of this issue, by…
Editor in Chief Daniel Simon picks three books that promise to unsettle, console, and inspire. Anne Carson Float Random House I fo…-
In the spring 1992 issue of World Literature Today, published to mark the quincentenary of Cristoforo Colombo’s encounter with the New World, Robert Berner writes: “The fact of the matter is…
Kim Stafford The Flavor of Unity: Post-Election Poems Little Infinities, 2017 Are you dreading the future after reading all the dystopian lit in this issue, or feeling paralyzed by the ge…-
How could utopia fail? – Elizabeth Fifer, “Dead Reckoning” In László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance—published the same year Hungarian communism collapsed a…
January 31, 2017For the past decade, World Literature Today has been proud to collaborate with Beijing Normal University to bring out an annual Chinese edition of the magazine as well as a biannual journal…-
Language written in the aftermath of extremity [arises] not from recollection in tranquility but from wanderings in a debris field. – Carolyn Forché, “An Inexhaustible Responsibility…
In a country as big as America it is as impossible to prophesy as it is to generalize, without being tripped up, but it seems to me that there is room for hope as well as mistrust. The epic loses…
April 27, 2016An in-class haiku translation project (2013) / Photo courtesy of Kimiko Hahn Recently, the Poetry Society of America announced award-winning poet Kimiko Hahn as its newly elected presid…
To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.…
Trans. Clare SullivanPhoneme Media, 2015 In an essay published in the January 2012 issue of World Literature Today, Clare Sullivan notes that poets who write in Zap…
. . . we sleep in the tents of the prophets . . . sing so that distance may forget us. . . . Ours is a country of words. – Mahmoud Darwish, “We Travel Like All People,” trans. Fady Joudah, in…-
To celebrate World Literature Today’s ninetieth year of continuous publication, I’m pleased to announce the 2016 Puterbaugh Essay Series, a yearlong suite of review-essays that survey the tw…
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Some days light is the color of all / my losses.—Lauren Camp, “Alma’s Stripes” Do poems have dimensions? We know they occupy space on the page, but can we measure verse the way we measure con…
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I noticed he was wearing white summer gloves and knew at once it was for poetry’s stigmata.—Zsuzsa Takács, “Masters Whose Doorsteps” Psalm 51, known to many by its opening lines in…
July 6, 2015Last week, we said farväl to our beloved book review editor, Marla Johnson, who retired after working at World Literature Today since 1992. For more than twenty years, Marla worked (…
