Half sleep / half death.

Out of milk, out of strong skin jumps the big brother.

Observe yourself in the mirror, / unchanged yet strange,

You don’t move on upon love, / you move on upon a territory.

Listen / You who chew on my solitude

With fingers—fingertips and edge of nail— / he plots fires with tongues of snakes,

darling, when it comes to strawberries / you’re like me

The phone holds rumors of a sunken ship, / bubbles and silences.

Dead swans on purple waters

In that town there was a room I kept circling.

The reason is that they don’t remain clean

Danse avec moi baby under the stormy sky

Octavio Paz once wrote that the modern poet “extracts his visions from within himself.”

Night / does not fall / nor does it come

invite people over. invite everyone.  to a feast.  a big feast.

A woman—I should say a stranger—who caresses you, jokes with you

You destroyed all letters. / You burned the heavenly garden.

gulls woke me

I walk toward the mill / To meet my quiet father

God’s Bits of Wood, first published in 1960 and translated from the French by Francis Price, is not only one of the best novels to have come out of Africa but one of the best political novels of the 20th century.

Bolaño’s preliminary note to Monsieur Pain, a short novel was first published in 1999 and appeared last month from New Directions, alludes to the author’s early desperation and tenacity. …

And Other Stories is a fledgling independent publisher of fiction in translation with a new, community-based approach. Editorial selection decisions will emerge from a consensus of readers, writers, and…

As Christian Hincker (a.k.a. Blutch) says in the video accompanying his contribution to the February Graphic Lit edition of Words Without Borders, an excerpt from the graphic novel That Was Happiness…

Around Valentine's Day, the go-to book for romantic African literature in translation has to be Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry. One of its many gems is this poem by Flavien Ranaivo…

I taught my son a simple rule when he, at the age of four or so, began to see the barrage of books that are part of the marketing effort behind movies. If the book came out first, the book is better,…

A friend invited me to go a panel with the title “What Does the Future Hold for Books in Translation?” at Melville House in Brooklyn. I had never been to Melville House. To be honest, I wasn’t…

As a lagniappe, we’re complementing our extract from Blutch’s That Was Happiness—in which a divorcing couple has The Talk with their young son—with a brief video of the artist…

Assia Djebar is a fiction writer, filmmaker, professor — currently at NYU — and a regular contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. She is known in the US for her novel So Vast the Prison…

Wolfgang Kubin, Bonn University Professor of Chinese Studies, is a critic in every sense of the word. Every time he speaks about Chinese literature, he makes waves among observers. He has become famous…