The plan involved gradually rewriting Don Quixote over the years, so that no one would notice and collective memories would forget the details. Implausible?

Curiously, in recent years God became the most outspoken critic of his own work

I burned down the McDonald’s, for the sake of my life

She finds my writing bizarre; no one does it, especially not in a town like this.

Crates of poultry are piling up in my yard, my attic’s an aviary, my cellar writhes with reptiles

I wanted the daughter who quit doing drugs cold turkey, at age ten.

The Eternonaut is a seminal work of Latin American literature. It’s been translated from Spanish into Italian and French, but never (until now) English. This section is taken from the original version…

Before he could reach for his abacus to add up the total, Tooba Khanum opened the folds of her chador to produce a rooster.

Write why you drew that cartoon and why you chose a Turkish word.

When the Bolsheviks took over, Tsar Nicholas summoned my father.

On the evening of the tenth day of the seventh lunar month, we “invited” all the ancestors to our home.

There are no words to express it in the language of men who die only once. 

Whenever she'd finish a city or an island, she would lift it in the air.

Zheng Xiaolu, editor of a literary magazine, is only twenty-five years old. He was probably twenty-two when he wrote this story.

During the red and yellow storms I even went out and watched the landscape changing color.

It's a General Map of Man with a special interpretation.

Right at the peak of the afternoon heat, a bus strolled into the local general store.

It wasn’t an accident that her head was not attached to her body.

I began the laborious ascent of the loaf.

But remember, the cornstalks are so gigantic you'll need the help of seasoned Goblin lumberjacks.

Special City Series/London 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.…

Chinese writer and painter MuXin died December 21. MuXin was born in 1927 in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, to an wealthy, aristocratic family. His original enthusiasam for Mao Zedong waned as, in the…

The opacity that his obituaries attribute to Kim Jong-il extends to North Korean literary culture. WWB has published a fair amount of writing from the country, starting with our second issue in September…

According to his own account, David Bellos’s recent book, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, began as a diatribe in response to a comment made by a parent of…

Scene: Wednesday, November 16 A hard, cold rain. Trenchcoats. New York’s diamond district. Interior: The Center for Fiction, one of several hosts to New Literature from Europe, an annual festival…

Under the heading “Algiers, Bubbles without Frontiers,” this year's International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Alger, or FIBDA)…

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, Invisible…

Translating Suzanne Dracius’s “Women’s Fantasies,” my first translation of her work, opened a portal to an exotic Caribbean culture surviving . . . no, living in the shadow of…

Early on in “The Other Day After the Rain,” in describing the decaying building in which he lives, the narrator identifies it as being in the “residual phase”, a phrase which puts…

Toward the end of his chronicle of the January 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake and its aftermath, called Tout bouge autour de moi, Dany Laferrière entitles one of his sections “La notion de…