Every street corner in Juarez harbors the story of a murder

The parakeet is cocaine, the rooster is the marijuana and the nanny goat is an AK-47 assault rifle.

This is the shield we use to protect ourselves: with so many people involved, I’m not going to be the first to act.

The authorities insist they are taking / appropriate steps / to control the plague of zombies

He was like a butcher who says, I don’t kill the cattle, I simply cut them up.

The Mexican literary world is in crisis as it tries to face the history of the present.

That was when Pedro went in, clamped his hand over the cop’s mouth, and got him in a neck lock.

Here, the killers protect us: they’re good people, they’re my friends.

I did not know that the earth / Is an unruly cradle

Noisy animals can see Kafka’s castle in the valleys of the Musashino plain

This is the image that for some time has been occupying and saturating public debate in Mexico: an undefined, unspeakable heap of corpses.

In which junkie’s syringe did you become trapped, my Homeland?

“Asako, how do you like this dream?” she asked, not turning her head from the hole.

On February 2, 1952, during a peaceful demonstration to demand national status in East Pakistan for the Bengali language, four students were shot dead in the street. A postcolonial trauma that would lead…

As the events of the Arab Spring unfolded last year, WWB published a number of dispatches from and about the affected countries.  One of our favorites came from Egyptian graphic novelist Magdy El…

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,…

The prolific Günter Grass has produced poems, plays, novels, novellas, memoirs, essays, and speeches, but Show Your Tongue is (at least so far) his only work that could be described as a travel book.…

In 1933, the posthumously acclaimed Swiss writer Robert Walser was living at the sanatorium he had entered four years earlier with severe depression, hallucinations, and writers’ block. Then in…

The Festival Neue Literatur has been around since 2010.  This festival of new writing from the German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) is put on in New York every year, in February,…

Regular readers of Words without Borders will remember Otto Bohater, the downbeat Warsaw detective, and his faithful partner, Watson the White Rat, who appeared in an extract from Essence in 2007. Their…

A prominent Korean literary critic once said of Pyun that her stories presented “a risky path” in Korean literature.

What he’d mistaken for a white dog was staring at him with red eyes.

The mother sent us out in the street naked

The female branches made off with the laundry on our lines

Yet the storm announced festive disorder

the foxes who recognized her by her smell didn’t light their matches

if a storm broke she collapsed in soot

Prix Goncourt winner Vénus Khoury-Ghata offers a bleak portrait of autumn through a child's eyes.

Her kitchen utensils fled after the last guest deserted her

Rutu Modan is a rarity. One of the few established comics artists in Israel, she is also one of the few established female comics artists in the world. After graduating from Bezalel Academy of Art and…