World Literature Today

1 month ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Emiley White |Michelle Johnson |James Fawcett |Madeline Meyers

This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access. When things are bad, I like to read books where things are even worse.

1 month ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Veronica Esposito

What is lost when a language dies? Our columnist considers the loss of languages across time and wonders what it would look like to re-Babel the world. How many languages have ever existed? It’s the kind of question that smacks of Borges’s unforgettable short story “The Library of Babel,” which imagines a library so vast in its exhaustion of language, form, content, and cognition as to be a universe in itself.

1 month ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Michelle Johnson |Emiley White |James Fawcett |Madeline Meyers

For those fascinated by bees, birdsong, and remembering biodiversity. For the window-watchers. For the trees. Here is a collection of environmental fiction and nonfiction titles that delve into our living world. Indra SinhaAnimal’s PeopleSimon & Schuster, 2009Alice Elliott DarkFellowship PointMarysue Rucci Books, 2023Imbolo MbueHow Beautiful We WereRandom House, 2021Fernanda TríasPink SlimeTrans. Heather ClearyScribner, 2024Rachel Heng The Great ReclamationRiverhead, 2024Richard PowersThe OverstoryW.

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

Lilach Galil’s 2009 novel, Betsilo (In its shadow), is a polyphonic novel told by the six main characters. Rona is a poet and a literary editor whose father, Michael, died when she was a child. Reading a memoir by a Holocaust survivor, Mr. Zimmerman, she feels that something is amiss and makes an appointment to meet with him. The excerpt is a description of their meeting. Unbeknownst to her, her boyfriend Idan is Eliezer’s grandson. This excerpt is at the core of the book.

2 months ago | worldliteraturetoday.org | Michelle Johnson

This page is available to subscribers. Click here to signin or get access. In February, Europa Editions published Katy Derbyshire’s English translation of Robert Seethaler’s eighth novel, The Café with No Name. The novel was a number-one seller in Germany and enjoyed forty weeks on the Spiegel best-seller list. In the novel, a young man raised in a home for war orphans opens a café in the market square of a poor neighborhood in Vienna.