Words Without Borders

3 weeks ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Robert Allen Papinchak |Tobias Carroll

Spanish novelist Juan José Millás has a keen knack for high-concept metafiction that blends fantasy with reality. In From the Shadows, published in English in 2019, the protagonist, a forty-three-year-old multitasker in high tech, loses his job and hides in an antique wardrobe, where he creates a new self and personality. This time, in the slim Only Smoke, Millás sees through his looking glass into the legendary fairy-tale territory of the Brothers Grimm.

1 month ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Areeb Ahmad |Anuradha Sarma Pujari

It is not a surprise that many of the stories in Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp draw on her own experiences. In a recent interview with Anitha Pailoor, she discusses the conviction needed to critically analyze the community to which one belongs:When I started writing in the 1970s, Kannada literature depicted Muslim characters either as highly virtuous or shockingly vile. The black-and-white characters did not reflect the realities of the Muslim community. I wanted to fill the gap.

1 month ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Nathalie Handal |Carmen Boullosa |Rafael Pérez Gay |Nina Perrotta

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains. —Italo Calvino, Invisible CitiesCan you describe the mood of El Paso as you feel/see it? First, what is visible: the lavish expanse of light. Light on the stone benches. Light on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the city.

1 month ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Alex Tan |Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey

A chronicler of the chimeric, the Egyptian writer Mansoura Ez Eldin has been celebrated in the Arab world for her feverish, fanciful plots. To read her feels like opening one’s eyes into a fugue state, a landscape in which the parameters of reality seem just slightly off-kilter. The air, in her universe, is always abuzz with ethereal presences and diaphanous bodies, anticipating the propitious moment for revelation.

2 months ago | wordswithoutborders.org | Tobias Carroll |Mandana Chaffa |Rebecca Hussey |Alina Stefanescu

From Schaffner Press | The Lives and Deaths of Véronique Bangoura by Tierno Monénembo, translated from the French by Ryan Chamberlain | Fiction | 240 pages | ISBN 9781639640591 | US$17.95 What the publisher says: “In this gripping novel set in both French Guinea and Paris, award-winning author (The King of Kahel) Tierno Monénembo explores themes of international exile, sexual abuse, generational trauma, and repressed memory of a people and country under the regime of dictator Sekou Toure from...