Tobias Carroll recommends new and exciting books in translation from Sudan, Belgium, Haiti, France, and South Korea.

Are there homosexual reindeer herders?

I thought I could create a space for sharing women’s global experiences through literary fiction. 

Her mother was dead, she knew that, but she did not know why her aunt and her uncle were the ones who took her in.

I had the look of a Westerner fresh off the boat, with my wrinkled trousers, tourist backpack, and it didn’t tally with my fluency in Kinyarwanda.

we take to the poem, a miracle with no church, with no witness.

Reading Roth’s Berlin miniatures, a sense of the dynamic between sociability and justice feels essential to the urban experience.

When they chucked me out in the middle of the goddamn winter, you gave me your coat and seven euros.

How likable the island when it isn’t / more than a door that opens outward.

Empire made English my mother tongue—and the only one I have any real dominion over.

My mother and I will burn it all.

For weeks, Ma didn’t feel a shred of warmth for the baby.

Tobias Carroll recommends new and exciting books in translation from Lebanon, China, Spain, Japan, and France.

I return to the world as I depart, / having birthed another phantom, / a dweller of nebulous coasts, / a brief enemy of metaphors.

In English, Hindi, and Bangla—the languages I use daily—we spoke only of death and distress.

I’ve always felt that my commitment is to the text, not the author, but it is wonderful to be able to ask for and receive permission.

Cristina Pérez Díaz writes about four Puerto Rican poets whose work operates in the constructions of queer bodies and of the nation.

Recent and forthcoming poetry in translation from Mexico, South Korea, Croatia, Haiti, and more.

sometimes i don’t want to be saved

I like to imagine that, in this defining moment, as my grandfather struggled with the dead man’s sinews, he was able to calm his rage for a moment and laugh.

Hypocrite that I am, I never acknowledged my true self out of cowardice, out of fear of being misunderstood, and, more than anything else, because I thought if they knew what I was, they’d despise me.

The world appeared in stages with each rung of the ladder I climbed.

As they drew nearer, knives in hand, Hilaire recognized the feverish eyes behind their scarves.

“We toppled Lenin!” exclaimed Firman after a dramatic pause.

Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books from Cameroon, Mexico, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and Kazakhstan.

The interplay of night and day. Deception and falsity.

Home is an ever-changing aspiration, not a truth or guarantee.

The transworld was so beautiful, so vast! There was so much to explore!

It’s sun-kissed, industrial, god-fearing, gas-guzzling, all of it built on a harrowing history of lynch mobs and expropriation.

A playlist for Hernán Bravo Varela's eulogy for his father and the music that he loved