Petina Gappah Rotten Row Faber & Faber 2016   Petina Gappah’s new collection of stories is named after the street where the criminal courts in Harare sit: Rotten Row, where the powerful…

This summer the British Library held another of its highly successful Bodies from the Library days celebrating the Golden Age of crime fiction. We had papers on Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, and George…

Liu Fang (center) plays the pipa during a rehearsal with the Matangi Quartet. I have great respect for all musical traditions and have enjoyed collaborating in past decades with great musici…

Gunnhild Øyehaug’s “Dreamwriter,” among other things, is a story about layers, layering, the lattice of the finished work and the trickle down that is life—that wonderful image, the tørrfiskstati…

In an era in which we spend an increasing number of our waking hours immersed in virtual and augmented realities, gliding across the two-dimensional surfaces of a placeless digital world, it is perhap…

Photo: flickr.com/people/feefoxfotos Like a beautiful, moody lover, Wellington doesn’t need to treat you kindly. Friends may sometimes wonder what you see in it, but when the city is goo…

In the foothills of the Himalayas, a few hundred meters below the Dalai Lama’s temple in Dharamshala, on a quiet, winding, monsoon-eroded road next to a motorcycle garage, sits the bookstore/café Illi…

Dick Francis and wife, Mary, stroll along the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Photo: Acey Harper / Life Image Collection / Getty Images When I was a newly minted assistant professor, Twayne’s Engl…

Guus Kuijer The Bible for Unbelievers: The Beginning: Genesis  Trans. Laura Watkinson  Seven Stories Press, 2016    The Bible has occupied a central position in Western culture sin…

Tajaliyatt Afoforo Music Club   Tajaliyatt is the second album from the ambitious Achref Chargui Trio. Composed of the aforementioned Chargui, a Tunisian oud playe…

Ana Blandiana Ana Blandiana is a poet of rich formal resources. Since her first book, First-Person Plural (1964), she has written in a variety of forms ranging from sonnets to traditionally…

The appetite for Malaysian fiction in the English-speaking world seems fixated on family sagas set in the Japanese Occupation of Malaya—stories largely irrelevant to the current sociopolitical challen…

A triptych mural by local artist John Stephens Coppin graces the third floor of the Detroit Public Library. There are cities that get by on their good looks . . . and there are cities li…

With a toddler to parent, WLT’s book review editor, Rob Vollmar, isn’t anticipating being able to go much of anywhere this summer, so he’s relying on his summer reads to take…

Editorial assistant Sara Wilson’s summer reading picks vary in content from knotty lovers’ quarrels to narratives gathered from the aftershock of warfare. She’s added some Neruda to h…

Summer weather has already arrived in Austin, and it’s the perfect excuse for WLT’s digital media editor, Jen Rickard Blair, to jump-start her annual summer reading list. Her…

Photos by Laura Hernandez Located in bustling Johannesburg, South Africa, the Apartheid Museum traces segregation along with the diversity of its people. As they enter, visitors experience a split en…

Alfredo Véa Jr. The Mexican Flyboy University of Oklahoma Press2016   Alfredo Véa Jr.’s The Mexican Flyboy is a novel likely to enhance its author’s reputation as a writer primed t…

A promotional still from the 1995 film adaptation of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington as private eye Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Mexican crime novelist Paco Igna…

With two novels and one book of literary miscellany, WLT managing editor Michelle Johnson’s summer reading list is taking shape. Though she’ll no doubt spend many early morni…

Ibrahim Maalouf Kalthoum Impulse! “Umm Kalthoum is the quintessential Arab,” Uncle Jihad said. “She’s probably the one person whom all Arabs can agree to love . . .”—Rabih A…

When Random House contacted me about translating a book by Pope Francis, I did a double take. I had worked for the publisher in the past on fiction but never on nonfiction. How on earth did my name c…

Whether spent at home, driving cross-country, or venturing abroad, summer demands its own reading list. These new books of 2016 will more than fill a backseat, suitcase, Kindle, or hammock. …

Photos: Logan Webb Birthplace and home of poet Dylan Thomas for more than half his life, the coastal city of Swansea in southern Wales echoes with his legacy—a residual haunting by i…

It is not unusual for those on a quest to understand Russia to plough through Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, and Tolstoy; the more adventurous add Bulgakov and Pasternak to their lists. Yet Russia of the twent…