An instant later a blaze shot up just above the ground, a live torch–a big cat in flames.

Where hard veins wake up on a mattress of abandonment.

Kang Yeong - Nam: Professor ! The signal from comrade Cheol - Ryeong's transmitter is coming from the direction of the basement here .

Shadows crash across the flesh of houses

It is a well established fact that we know our own countries better from afar.

His mother smiled stupidly, flapped her heavily mascaraed eyelashes, and missed the plate with her fork.

And I'm supposed to become an accomplice to these Frankensteins!

He kept the body under the counter, right where he stored his medicinal herbs.

Admit it, pal, you’re Hoovering up every word.

Someone rushes to a house that's been moved away.

It was afternoon on Friday, March 11, 2011.  I was in the office at my home in Sendai, working on a manuscript I had just started.  Spring is the season of new beginnings.  In Japan, graduation…

Like many American-born English speakers, I have an unhappy story to tell about my ignorance of the rest of the world’s languages. It begins in my youth when I spent eight years studying Latin.…

and lovely laughing – oh it / puts the heart in my chest on wings

As translator Ross Benjamin said during his discussion with The New Republic‘s senior editor Ruth Franklin this past February at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Job: The Story of a Simple…

Being on the receiving as well as the dealing end of reviewing literature in translation, I’m particularly sensitive to the issues involved. More than three quarters of the reviews and essays I’ve…

Daniel Hahn (1973 – ) is a British writer, editor and translator from the Portuguese and Spanish. His translations include works by José Eduardo Agualusa, José Luís Peixoto…

The translators of Kafka, Thomas Mann, Cervantes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Ernesto Cardenal on how critics can review global literature.

Domenico Starnone has written for film both directly and indirectly: he has over a dozen screenplays to his credit, and has had one of his novels, Denti, turned into a film. This interview was conducted…

Special City Series / New York City 2011If 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…

Special City Series / New York City 2011If 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…

Les Cousins Claude Chabrol This dark, eerie—and stunted—coming-of-age story has been following me around for months since I recently saw it for the first time.  In a word, it’s…

I’m a translator, whose translations get reviewed regularly in the mainstream press; I’m also a reviewer who reviews translations regularly in the mainstream press. In probably more or less…

This week, we are launching a series to explore the ways that book reviews handle translations. Reviewers and translators each have varied opinions on how translations should be discussed, and on who…

The first time I saw Diva, I was about the same age as Jules, the French mailman, opera enthusiast, and thief who is its hero. Most likely I saw it at the intimate and old-fashioned Brattle Theater in…

Special City Series/New York City 2011 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…

Saadi Yacef headed the Algerian rebel movement, the Front de Libération Nationale, in Algiers until his capture in summer 1957. Unlike his fellow combatants in the movement, murdered in captivity…

I began going to see foreign films in 1986, the year I got my driver’s license.  My friends and I would meet in the subterranean parking garage of a deserted business complex in downtown Houston…

Behnam Dayani's “Hitchcock and Agha Baji,” from our inaugural July/August 2003 issue, combines an Iranian teenage film buff, a Hitchcock classic, and a character straight out of the Arabian…

In honor of the new Movies Issue, we’re writing about our favorite foreign films; my choice: À Tout de Suite (2005), written and directed by Benoît Jacquot. Conceptually, À Tout…

The fiction of Naguib Mahfouz is marked by a clear, harsh view of modern Egyptian life, and his characters are frequently unsympathetic. Adrift on the Nile, one of the brief novels Mahfouz wrote in the…