The capital city of Cyprus, Nicosia, is encircled by stone walls shaped like a star with eleven heart-shaped bastions that once served as military fortification for the Venetians who were one in the long…

When I was first asked to answer the question, “have you been influenced by Peter Handke?” my inclination was simply to say “no.”  I had simply held his title On a Dark Night…

First published in our December 2007 Departures issue, Gaute Heivoll's  “Dr. Gordeau” follows a Norwegian man on an ominous trip to an unnamed country in search of a sex change. Seeking…

I nearly gave up on Leila Ahmed’s memoir A Border Passage. After a lovely, quiet opening that describes the wind in the trees at the house on the edge of Cairo where the author grew up, the narrative…

I found The Fool on a cluttered table in Korporacja Ha!art’s bookstore in Kraków, a cozy, smart, artfully cluttered space above a contemporary art gallery, Bunkier Sztuki. Among its idiosyncratic…

As first lines go, that of Leïla Marouane’s second novel and debut in English, The Abductor (2000, translated by Felicity McNab), is a masterpiece of concision and intrigue: “My father…

Last week, Rohan and I sat down with Alex Epstein who was in New York City visiting from Tel Aviv. We had a very nice discussion on his book, Blue has no South, on mythology, angels, Jorge Luis Borges…

Adam Rovner talks about translating Yehoshuah Bar-Yosef’s Soul Mate, an excerpt from which was published in this month’s issue of WWB. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Israeli…

The Bolaño short fiction that’s been coming out in the New Yorker and Harper’s over the past few months is getting stranger. Necrophilia and the Colombian porno industry are edgy enough…

PEN has just announced the winners of the 2010 translation awards, and we're delighted to see three of our translators on the list. Congratulations to Peter Golub, awarded for his translations of…

The Russian poet Andrei Voznesensky has died at seventy-seven. Here are the first and last stanzas from his “Darkmotherscream,” translated by Robert Bly and Vera Dunham, in The Ecco Anthology…

bell. alina sits at her desk. anka in the last row.

Endless, the levee. Endless, the dead straight path.

On virtual seasI surfrecklesslyin every shapethat I inventfor myselfomnipotentGod among GodsmercifullyI submergea vulnerablefatecreate the worldi seven secondsdisappearinto whoever’s storythat only the…

How did you begin writing The Fool, and what motivated you to tell this particular story?

On the bottom of the seas                                                                      …

The office building across the street lit up like a Christmas tree every morning.

During the twilight hours of one day in January, the professor and his wife arrived at a small motel on the beach at Islamorada

Soul, you are a street, leading into rain / from the outskirts full of dry leaves

Right up till Friday afternoon the casting location was still not settled.

My father-in-law, Feibush, arrived unannounced at my doorstep in the middle of the week.

I’m writing to send you my new address.

Just gone to bed

The mood at the BookExpo America conference this year was decidedly upbeat and busy. The shortened, mid-week schedule seemed to work better than anticipated by exhibitors*, reports of good sales numbers…

Alfred Kazin once said of Hemingway that he “brought a major art to a minor vision of life.” To judge from the novel The Prospector, the same could be said of its author, the 2008 Nobel laureate…

The June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books includes Jose Manuel Prieto's fascinating “Reading Mandelstam on Stalin,” translated by the impeccable Esther Allen. Prieto describes…

Forest of a Thousand Daemons was written in 1938 in response to a literary contest sponsored by the Nigerian ministry of education. It is considered the first novel to be written in Yoruba and one of…

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has introduced readers to the best of foreign contemporary fiction since it was founded in 1991, attracting more press interest every year. It acknowledges both the…

Last night the Poetry Foundation held its annual Pegasus Award ceremony at the Arts Club of Chicago, and our Ilya Kaminsky blew the roof right off. Speaking in his capacity as a former recipient of a…