Even god was still dreaming

Mozart says / keep your eye on this Beethoven / he’s going to rock the world

The improbable woman was dressed in black Her diverse shadow and her hallucinations were there only to redefine the furtive with appropriate optimism, I could not elude her —Slaheddine Haddad,”A…

Resuming last week's conversation, the speculation continues. Britain's suspiciously accurate Ladbrokes bets on Adonis at 4:1, followed by Tomas Transtromer at 9:2 and Peter Nadas at 10:1. Thomas…

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.                                                                      …

Muharem Bazdulj lives in Sarajevo, works as a journalist for Oslobodjenje daily, and has published more than ten books (novels, short stories, essays, poetry). His books have been translated into English,…

Literature, claims the director of this year's International Literature Festival in Berlin, Ulrich Schreiber, can be our society's political and moral compass. Since 2001, the Festival…

I was born into Spanish but grew up in English. I was born in Guatemala and lived there until we moved to South Florida with my family, the day of my tenth birthday, in August of 1981, and I immediately…

“The good, the admirable reader,” said Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature, “identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived…

Between the World Cup and the World Series comes high season for world literature: time to place your bets on this year's candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. You can read two of the usual…

I arrived in Montevideo on the first full day of winter in the southern hemisphere. The dark, muddy winter light was a shock after the bright, metallic air of New York on the eve of summer. Montevideo…

I spent the academic year 2001–2 in Berlin.  This was a year bracketed by tragedies that took place in my absence—one huge and life-changing for millions of people, one small and life-changing…

Another year and its layers of dust and debris. Ten years gone by and the pictures, the words still as sharp and vivid. Glass you dare not touch with your fingers. It all happened across the Atlantic,…

Poet Ali Al Jallawi fled Bahrain in April of this year, one of many political activists, journalists, and writers who left the country rather than risk arrest during a crackdown against pro-democracy…

I was the one who killed Borges.

If I was a cactus, what kind of plant was Midori?

“Come now, Hemingway,” she teased, “you really don’t know this gentleman’s stories?”

Maestro, I said, tell me, / reveal to me the secret of poetry.

Because we lived in brothels / and in dungeons

That night / Of Greek drunkenness/ In a Berlin tavern

for one stray word / would mean the fall of kingdoms

If he and I had been able to exchange space and time, he might well have become “Trout Fishing in America.”

He recommended Valium and a trip to London.

And you need to promise me one thing: don’t let them give me any injections.

He writes the way someone who is no longer impatient speaks.

There’s no such thing as comfort for unhappy men.

only i am cruelty-free

By Zeus, do you know how to bring owls to Athens!

Amazing spring, warm, humid / and full of backlit trees.

Every word Du Fu uses, he read somewhere.