The Communists disliked comics, but recognized they could be used as propaganda.

Doctors, Poinçon, I want doctors! Specialists.

What does a man need to live? A bit of bread is enough.

King-Ma Has Come (Ma Huang Jiang Lin) is a product of the hugely popular kuso culture in Asia. Also known as egao in Mandarin Chinese, the genre is known for its campy humor and outrageous parodies of…

The graphic novel Farm 54 brings together three semi-autobiographical stories from the childhood, puberty, and early adulthood (military service years) of its female protagonist, growing up in Israel’s…

In all honesty, Ruben was at a loss to explain what was happening to him.

In addition to her freelance writing for the New Yorker’s Goings On About Town and her frequent forays into dance criticism, Marina Harss is also a versatile and prolific translator from French, Spanish,…

 “Play with all your mind, play” I think, echoing here the epigraph to Life A Users Manual with my own substitution, that Georges Perec would have liked the “Searching…

(Godine is publishing a new, corrected edition of Life A User's Manual and the first-ever English edition of Perec's essays collected in Thoughts of Sorts. I recently spoke with Susan Barba, an…

 In the spirit of our PerecFest, I recommend Juan Filloy’s Op Oloop, published last summer by Dalkey Archive in Lisa Dillman’s ingenious translation. The title chimes with upending…

4) “Grifalconi shook his head.  In one of the attics in Château de la Muette he had found the remains of a table.  Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally…

“Father's Return from War. Topics,” by Horia GârbeaThis string of eight vignettes, “Father's Return from War,” translated from the Romanian by Mihaela Mudure, does…

3) For years I put off telling the tale of my voyage to W. (Opening of W or The Memory of Childhood)   When near the end of his statement of intent Perec addresses the motivation behind so much apparent…

Warren Motte is among the most vibrant and resourceful critics of French contemporary fiction in the world today. Professor of French and Italian at the University of Colorado, Boulder, he received his…

Goethe, a literary father-figure to Heinrich von Kleist, may have sensed an Oedipal bloodlust in the emerging poet and playwright: “With the best will in the world towards this poet,” he wrote,…

2) We should learn to live more on staircases. But how? (species of spaces 38)   Perec’s actual and hypothetical leaping up and down, forward and backward, and diagonally and sidewise, etc.…

In Afghanistan—where, eight years after the toppling of the Taliban by US and allied troops, women are still routinely arrested and jailed for “running away” or for adultery, where current…

In The Pattern in the Carpet, her recent memoir cum history of the jigsaw puzzle, Margaret Drabble pays tribute to Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec, an enormous experimental novel also concerned…

 1)  I write…               I write: I write…              …

Quim Monzó's “The Fork” and “Thirty Lines” Quim Monzó's contribution of two stories to January's International Flash Fiction issue have been translated…

Murakami Bootlegs No More Haruki Murakami's major works have long been available in the United States, but the author has refused too allow distribution of his first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing…

When I attempt to state what I have tried to do as a writer since I began, what occurs to me first of all is that I have never written two books of the same kind, or ever wanted to reuse a formula, or…

When I began reading Words Without Borders some years ago my first reaction was always “who the hell are these people?”  – the writers, that is, all these authors I'd never…

At MLA in Philadelphia, the theme was translation, the community was out in force, and the Benjamin evoked was Walter, not Franklin. Here the discussion of translation focused not only on technique or…

Listening to NPR over breakfast last month, I was surprised to hear a story from Western Sahara, a country that doesn’t make the news very often. Formerly a colony of Spain and occupied since 1976…

In the latest in his Poeboes podcast series for Words without Borders, André Naffis speaks to poet and translator from the Italian Jamie McKendrick. Jamie McKendrick (1955 – ) lives in Oxford…

Chinese rock star Cui Jian begins his song “The 90s” with the line: “Words are not precise already—can’t express this world clearly.” And in the clarity of that expression,…