;
Alene Puterbaugh. Painting by Ed Kelley.
In March 1972, in response to a letter from University of Oklahoma president Paul F. Sharp addressed to her late husband, Alene Puterbaugh wrote: “I wish to a…
Daniel Simon
“In the United States . . . there is the obscure, slow effort of an entire nation to seize universal history and assimilate it as its patrimony.”—Jean-Paul Sartre, “Americans and Their Myths,…
April 21, 2015Zack Rogow and students from the Norman Public Schools | Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art | April 2, 2015. Photos: Daniel Simon In a recent essay for WLT, Hungarian writer Zsolt Láng muses on wri…
In a recent op-ed for Mother Jones, Ted Genoways laments the declining cultural influence of university-sponsored literary magazines, many of which have been faced with dwind…
Graywolf Press, 2014 How much of a poet’s biography can be read into (or behind) a book of poems? In the case of Fanny Howe’s latest collection, Second Childhood, the temptation to project a…-
Literature and storytelling confirm us as relatives and neighbors in our infinite diversity. — Mia Couto, “Re-enchanting the World” In her nominating statement for the 2014 Neustadt Internat…
- [After 1989], I felt as though I had crawled out from under the debris of a mass collision of historical proportions, slightly scraped, yet a new man. – Durs Grünbein, “The Vocation…
From our vantage point here on the Oklahoma plains, we’re constantly reminded that we live in “Native America” (every time we look at the license plate of a car in front of us), but few probably real…-
[Borges’s] Argentinians act out Parisian dramas, his Central European Jews are wise in the ways of the Amazon, his Babylonians are fluent in the paradigms of Babel. – Anthony Kerrig…
April 18, 2014When news broke yesterday about the death of Gabriel García Márquez, the entire staff of World Literature Today paused to reflect on the legacy of a writer who not only redrew t…-
When I first met Maaza Mengiste in May 2012 at a French Roast café in Manhattan’s West Village, I was in New York to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. I had just gotten…
While working on the “Classics Rekindled” section that appears in this issue (page 35), I was struck by the following words from Anne Carson: “Every time a poet writes a poem he is asking the…-
It is as if the world broke off. Why did it break off? Because the myth ended. – Anne Carson, preface to Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides For those who subsc…
- Five years on from the Great Recession, WLT is proud to present an international sampling of working-class literature, guest-edited by Jeanetta Calhoun…
September 25, 2013Walter Neustadt Jr. (left) and Álvaro Mutis at the Neustadt banquet, University of Oklahoma, October 18, 2002 The editors and staff of World Literature Today were greatly sadden…- Daniel Simon The themes of “Turning Thirty” have an archetypal feel to them—sickness, death, rebirth, forbidden love, truth, happiness, naming, freedom, madness, fear, solitude. Do y…
- When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction? – Adrienne Rich, “Inscriptions,” 1991–95 In an essay on “The Homoerotics of Travel,” Ruth Vanita proposes mobility as a def…
- In an essay first published in these pages eighty years ago, Albert L. Guérard wonders whether there is an “intimate and inevitable connection between nationality and literature” (April 1933). While…
- May 30, 2013Recent issues of WLT have featured Tahmima Anam (Bangladesh), Marina Carr (Ireland), and Julia Franck (Germany) on the cover. Two weeks ago, in a post on Words Without Borders, Alis…
- All the world’s a stage. – Shakespeare When I went to Boston in March to attend, for the first time, the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) conference, everything abo…
March 18, 2013Photo by Jonathan Stalling Two weeks ago, at the 2013 conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in Boston, I spoke on the panel “Looking Out: American Journals on the World Stag…- “It’s been said of Picasso that he studies an object like a surgeon dissects a corpse. We want no more of these embarrassing corpses, these objects. Light i…
In Beauty Bright, Gerald Stern, W. W. Norton, 2012 In “Four Crises,” an essay in his 2012 collection Stealing History, Gerald Stern writes: “Humans, because of their minds, because o…- Think of consciousness as a territory just opening to settlement and exploitation, something like an Oklahoma land rush. Put it in color, set it to music, frame it in images. . . . – Saul Be…
- In the spirit of the dead, the living, and the unborn, empty your ears of all impurities, o listener, that you may hear my story. - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Wizard of the Crow (2006) Article 6 of…
