World Literature Today

3 days ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Leila Guerriero |Fernanda Melchor |Guadalupe Nettel

Nettel delivered the following keynote talk, “Escribir con luz,” in Spanish, alternating with the English read by her translator, Rosalind Harvey. “Iwas born with a white beauty mark, or what others call a birthmark, covering the cornea of my right eye. That spot would have been nothing had it not stretched across my iris and over the pupil through which light must pass to reach the back of the brain.

2 weeks ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Veronica Esposito

Veronica Esposito looks at the strangely fascinating imagery authors have used to describe self-translation and the battle between two languages, from Jhumpa Lahiri’s macabre metaphors to Ariel Dorfman’s self-described “bed where the two vocabularies coupled.” Writing in her book Translating Myself and Others (2022), celebrated author Jhumpa Lahiri offers two curious images to describe the feeling of authoring a work in Italian, ever aware of the overwhelming likelihood that she will one day...

2 weeks ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Maria Moran |Tomas Moniz |Lo Wen Yu |Jason M. Thornberry

by Fion Tse“Nightfall, Beyond Words” is extracted from a chapter of Lo Yu’s novel Yung Yung, originally written in Chinese and published in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Yung Yung follows the narrator, Yin, through issues of language, identity, and love through the germination and dissolution of her romantic relationship with another woman, Yung. Yin and Yung meet on a dating app and sparks fly instantly, but Yung already has a girlfriend whom she’s unwilling to break up with.

1 month ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Maria Moran |Tomas Moniz |Jason M. Thornberry |Anna Voltaggio

after Mahler’s 5th Symphony, 2nd Movement – Stürmisch bewegt, mit größter VehemenzThe explosion had wrecked the whole street; only this one window was left undamaged. Clearly a shop window. The panes to the left and right, together with the door, had been blown in, as they had on all the other houses in the street. Just one grenade, he thought. And then he thought, Finish the job. With a quick jab of his rifle butt, he smashed in the remaining pane. It went down with a crash.

2 months ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Michelle Johnson

This page is available to subscribers. Click here to signin or get access. In May, Katie Goh’s Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange was published by Tin House. A hybrid work of memoir, science, and history, Foreign Fruit follows the complicated history of the orange, an investigation that parallels Goh’s search into her own heritage. In Foreign Fruit, the history of the orange as a narrative frame for your own heritage seems to shift as we move through the book.