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…
In Every Issue
Iceland enjoys a powerful literary tradition, underpinned by the old Icelandic sagas and Eddaic poems and also by the Icelanders’ struggle for emotional and spiritual survival during centuries of pove…
Still writing “on this earthquake fault” in San Francisco, feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima continues to create her revolutionary verse. At eighty, aged out of the thirty-under-thirty and forty-under…
A Ukrainian writer looks outside the country for three books that help illuminate what threatens modern Ukraine. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Barbara Demick This…
It’s the holiday season once again, and whether you’re shopping for Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Christmas, WLT has a new book for every reader on your list. For the Beatnik Diane…
The spectacular sounds and exoticism of Mongolian music often attract audiences outside the Mongolian cultural area—the rough, unreal human voice of khöömii (throat singing), the wide range…
With a dose of wit and self-deprecation, Aaliya is a narrator who doesn’t fail to entertain. Rabih Alameddine invites the reader into Aaliya’s late-life crisis where—after a few glasses of red wine—sh…
The following books offer insights into the hot, gritty quotidian of a desert nation and the machinations of an authoritarian power structure as integral to Egypt’s character as the Nile. The…
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…
Digital media editor Jen Rickard Blair’s summer reading picks range from multiethnic mystery to dystopian sci-fi. We suspect she’ll read these in a lawn chair or on the…
Cat people: we aren’t known for much other than spinsterhood, paranoia, emotional and social disconnection. Our one spokesperson who’s more than quaint at best is Catwoman. But lately there’s been…
The Watchtower Elizabeth Harrower The Watchtower, first published in 1966, is a psychological novel of class and power set in Sydney in the 1940s. Laura, the elder sister, had ambitions to be…-
[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…
Photos by Laura Hernandez Climbing up the steep and narrow staircase to the hidden apartment is when it hits me: Anne Frank lived here; this is where she spent two years, secluded, waiting fo…
Wilfred Price has established himself as a respectable, reliable member of his small and tightly woven rural community of Narberth, Wales. He performs his duties impeccably as the town’s undertaker, c…- Over thirty-something years of music video, we have gotten what we might have expected of a new (?) art (?) form (?): the sedimentation of practices, followed by the stirring up of new possibilities;…
It should go without saying that children bear the brunt of war as a nation’s most vulnerable citizens. Yet Graça Machel’s 1996 UNICEF report on the impact of war on children was new in both scope and…
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…
Translated literature is for grown-ups—or so goes conventional anglophone wisdom. And yet there are excellent translated titles available for younger readers, offering them a broader literary pala…
It’s the holiday season, and whether you’re shopping for Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Christmas, WLT has a new book for every reader on your list. For the Activist Juliana Spahr…
What distinguishes the modern surveillance-and-control state from its predecessors is technodeterminism: the use of algorithms, not human beings, to monitor and shape citizens’ attitudes and behavior.…
For a Song and a Hundred Songs Liao Yiwu New Harvest, 2013 Though Liao Yiwu is yet another name in a long line of censored Chinese literary and artistic critics like Liu Xiaobo, Ai Weiwei, and Hu Jia…
In the print edition of WLT, I recommended LGBT books with a political slant. These books reflect the importance of our role as artists. At the intersection of art and sexuality, art must tru…- Not far from 23rd and L, where the hotel Havana Libre, the Yara movie theater, and the popular Coppelia ice cream parlor converge, Eliezer Jiménez’s bookshop offers a vast selection of books to curiou…
The Bridge of Beyond Simone Schwarz-Bart, Barbara Bray, tr. New York Review Books Classics, 2013 Born in 1938 on the southwest coast of France, Caribbean writer Simone Schwarz-Bart spent her childhood…