For the special Sicily series of the City and the Writer, Roberto Alajmo speaks with Nathalie Handal about elasticity, death, and paintings in Palermo.

This month, Transit Books publishes Siblings, East German author Brigitte Reimann’s first novel to appear in English. In this excerpt, the protagonist discovers that her brother and his wife have defected to the West.

Bulgarian author Yordanka Beleva explores the sorrows left behind after a neighbor’s passing in this folkloric short story.

In honor of International Women's Day 2023, WWB recommends 10 forthcoming books written and translated by women and published by small presses.

Jenny Bhatt wraps up our Gujarati feature with her essay on Gujarati literary history and the importance of translation as a mode of recovery and reclamation.

Moeen Farrokhi considers recent Iranian political history—including the ongoing #WomanLifeFreedom protests—through the lens of soccer.

Listen to Jenny Bhatt interview Sachin Ketkar on subtractive and creative bilingualism and the challenges of Gujarati translation.

One year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, poet Iryna Shuvalova proposes an aesthetics of escape.

Clare Cavanagh remembers the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski and translates a poem from his final collection “True Life,” out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Mario Borio talks with Nathalie Handal about technology, ecosystems, and living literature in Assisi.

Meena Desai translates a Gujarati ghazal by Befaam about love and appearances.

Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books translated from Arabic, Croatian, Spanish, and Russian.

“It needn’t be me. I mean . . . I . . . I’m not much of an orator.”

Rather audaciously, given her age, she wore her hair in a buzz cut on the sides and in the back.

Violence—slow, fast, indirect, direct—is exercised against the islands and our way of living here.

Gandhi was a very close reader of languages and literatures.

The city murmured in the mazes of her ancient face.

Here, all things old have been suppressed.

The judges of the inaugural National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize share their appreciations of the twelve longlisted titles.

She had seen the man make the sign for death, so she knew this was serious.

Oh Khodanur, / Your half-finished dance / Makes walking on earth unjust.

Every night I wake up several times. I have nightmares of executions.

An anonymous author reflects on their relationship to history and on what it means to both witness and participate in historic protests in Iran.

Because I fear for my family whose faces I only know from albums

The little girl told her mother: / I wish my hair was made of fire

People said Bedo Bora was a foot fetishist. He was fascinated by women’s feet, they said. When you met him he stared at your feet.  

I have been opening this book since 2018 and over the years, I have become many different readers.

I aim to commemorate the many beloved lives taken from us during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. 

It must be an effect of the light, but Rome can be a maze . . .

“You don't want to appear as the father, do you?”