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1 month ago | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Elete Nelson-Fearon |Lia Galvan Lisker |Alexander Aguayo |Tobias Carroll
Each year, WWB is proud to publish over a dozen writers whose work has never before appeared in English. This IWD, meet eight women writers who we introduced to anglophone readers this past year. 1. Emma BraslavskyEmma Braslavsky writes, moderates, curates, and directs. In her short story “The VANISHÄVEN Furniture System: A Demonstration,” Braslavsky introduces a furniture system that aims to solve one of the world’s crises—but creates a few problems of its own.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Lia Galvan Lisker |Alexander Aguayo |Isabel Zapata |Nina Perrotta
This reading list spotlights books by nine Mexican women writers who are shaping the literary scene in Mexico and beyond. These novels, works of nonfiction, and short story collections were all translated into English by women, and each denounces and resists various forms of violence in its own distinct way. 1.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Hannah Weber |Alexander Aguayo
People falling in love are generally no fun to be around. It’s not any better or worse if the object of their affection is lukewarm about the whole thing—it’s simply another flavor of intolerable. Vigdis Hjorth plays a ruthless game with this tolerance in If Only, a portrait of a woman consumed by a love affair that is both intoxicating and annihilating.
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Aug 1, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Cory Oldweiler |Chiara Marchelli |Alexander Aguayo
With the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death this year, attention to his every surviving sentence feels ubiquitous, and much of the credit—or blame—can be ascribed to his dear friend Max Brod. Kafka begged Brod multiple times to burn, “unread,” everything he left behind when he died, including his diaries, letters, notes, and the manuscripts for his three novels—The Trial, The Castle, and the unfinished Amerika.
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Jun 4, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Golan Haji |Rodaan Al Galidi |Alexander Aguayo
Translator’s Note: The following poem by Kurdish–Syrian writer Golan Haji, written in the winter of 2022, was slated to appear in Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Continental drift: the Arab Europe, 2023). Edited by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sylvia Geist, the ground-breaking anthology was to feature contemporary work by thirty-four poets writing in Arabic who are based in Europe.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Carol Sansour |Olivia Duchesne |Olivia Snaije |Alexander Aguayo
Translator’s Note: The following poem by Palestinian poet Carol Sansour was slated to appear in Kontinentaldrift: Das Arabische Europa (Continental drift: the Arab Europe, 2023) but was among ten poems abruptly removed by German publishers Haus für Poesie. Edited by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sylvia Geist, the ground-breaking anthology features work by thirty-one poets writing in Arabic who are based in Europe.
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May 22, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Raoul de Jong |Judith Kiros |Lauren Goldenberg |Alexander Aguayo
Dear Jaguar Man,The Spanish were the first strange men to appear on your jaguar coast, in search of the mythical golden city, El Dorado. It was on April 23, 1594, that one of them hammered a cross into the ground and declared: “In the name of God I claim this land for His Majesty Don Felipe, our lawful overlord!” Those strange visitors would never find El Dorado. But they also wouldn’t leave your country in peace.
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May 11, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Judith Kiros |Murat Özyaşar |Kristian Lundberg |Alexander Aguayo
In color. A black man rests among the roses. He’s tired, he’s neither wounded nor dead. Petals stick to his hair like the light of winter. You turn around in your dream, bite the inside of my thigh . . . You’re right. I’m too much a coward to stay. *A sudden cold snap. Rain causes the blue mountains to rear up, stray dogs to bark loudly, it makes thin scarred cats hiss at their wet fur. The song of the mosque and the song of the church are two birds falling upward at dawn. I’m so far away.
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May 7, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Olivia Snaije |Alexander Aguayo
In April, New York-based Other Press published Tale of a Wall, a memoir by Nasser Abu Srour, translated from Arabic by Luke Leafgren. Abu Srour is a Palestinian prisoner serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison. He was arrested in 1993, accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an Israeli intelligence officer, and sentenced to life in prison. Before October 7, 2023, Abu Srour was one of more than 5,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
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May 7, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Ahmed Naji |Fatema Haidari |Ruth Kemp |Alexander Aguayo
1. Las Vegas was brimming with mosques. As soon as I’d typed “mosque near me” into the Google Maps search, myriad red dots displayed themselves all at once on my screen. The Al-Hamada mosque, one of the first Las Vegas mosques founded in the seventies, and winner of a five-star rating, boasted a review claiming that its writer had “felt at peace” as soon as he’d crossed over the threshold.
