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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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Jul 17, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Sylee Gore |Chiara Marchelli
Japanese author Yoko Tawada’s novella Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, energetically translated from German by Susan Bernofsky, unravels through an absurdist blend of first- and third-person narration. The book follows Patrik, an infirm young Berlin-based Celan scholar who was born in Germany to immigrants from Ukraine.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Summer Farah |Chiara Marchelli |Carol Sansour
I often engage with the speculative as a language for engaging with liberatory political frameworks—let our minds wander toward the what-if and undo the bounds of the colonial structures we have learned and existed under for so long. Zaina Alsous is a poet who exemplifies this potential—her poem “The Workers Love Palestine,” first published in Jewish Currents, is the first I turn to when the rotted present makes a future seem impossible. Its futuristic setting is bare.
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Jun 13, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Benjamin Woodard |Chiara Marchelli
Set during the 1962 FIFA World Cup hosted by Chile, Carlos Labbé’s The Murmuration is an experimental high-wire act that uses the framework of soccer to comment on gender and class warfare, as well as rising consumerism, within the nation.
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Apr 21, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Cory Oldweiler |Chiara Marchelli |Tobias Carroll |Nino Haratischvili
Nino Haratischvili has said that personal history didn’t significantly factor into her fiction until her third novel, 2014’s The Eighth Life, a Brobdingnagian epic chronicling the twentieth century in her native Georgia. She was born in the capital, Tbilisi, in 1983, when the country was still a Soviet Republic, and spent the chaotic first years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union moving between Georgia and Germany, where she ultimately settled in 2003.
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Apr 16, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Lora Maslenitsyna |Chiara Marchelli |Ruth Kemp |Kelly Zhang
Tradition and modernity are locked in a miserable marriage in Baqytgul Sarmekova’s short story collection To Hell with Poets. The children of this union spend their lives in Kazakhstan’s auls bursting with gossip, lonely apartments in the sprawling capital of Astana, and at busy markets. Sarmekova’s characters attempt to broker a peace with their circumstances but often meet tragic consequences. Occasionally, and perhaps by no act of their own, they encounter brief glimmers of a conceivable future.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Joyelle McSweeney |Chiara Marchelli |Carol Sansour
Did the butterfly illuminate youwhen it burned with the eternal light of the rose? –Mahmoud Darwish, “Now When you Awaken, Remember,”The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady JoudahWhat comes after the end of the world? This question is continuously on my mind as I read the work of the ancients and my contemporaries, from Kim Hyesoon and Raúl Zurita to Antonin Artaud, Euripides, and Azo Vauguy—and I read them all in translation.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg |Chiara Marchelli |Tobias Carroll
There’s a part of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 I think about frequently. The narrator, who teaches creative writing at a university in New York City, is visited by a student during office hours. The student is impassioned but incoherent, rambling about poetry and porousness and molecules. There’s something wrong with his language, his affect; he’s associating too freely—maybe it’s the result of an amphetamine (prescribed or not), maybe problems at home. “Calvin . . .
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Mar 14, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Julia Kornberg |Chiara Marchelli |Tobias Carroll |M. Bartley Seigel
On September 13, 1987, in the city of Goiânia, Brazil, not far from the country’s capital, a small capsule of highly radioactive material was stolen from an abandoned hospital. Although the site, the Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia, required high security, its former owners had neglected the place and squatters and looters had frequented it, intermittently, over the years.
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Feb 26, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Hannah Weber |Chiara Marchelli
Tobi Lakmaker’s debut novel, The History of My Sexuality, was first published in Dutch in 2020 and garnered acclaim in the Netherlands for its witty exploration of gender identity and sexual orientation. Although it’s unwise to hinge your expectations on marketing materials, praise for the book focused on its “honesty” and “unflinching vulnerability”—yet much of what was sold as “unfiltered” very quickly felt superficial.
