Her voice still sounded friendly, but it had that slight quaver that signaled danger.

My father was horrified when I told him that I was getting married and that the date and place were already set.

My bag in the back of the truck, the Antarctica bottles open, and we're off.

Well, I don't know, but somehow those East German men don't interest me.

Before we launch the November issue, we'd like to highlight Abdourahman Waberi's wonderful piece of reportage on Rwanda, fifteen years after the genocide, “Rawanda: The Flame of Hope.”…

I carried everything I had. It wasn't actually mine.

Manu Dibango is a jazz saxophonist with an international reputation. His song “Soul Makossa” is sometimes credited with being the first disco tune. Dibango was born in Cameroon in 1933. At…

Spain's Prince of Asturias Awards Cultural exchange continues in Europe among prestigious prize-givers, with Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré cinching the Prince of Asurias Award for literature.…

Recently I blogged about Bending the Bow, a surprising and engaging new anthology of African love poetry edited by Malawian poet and professor Frank Chipasula. Since then I’ve learned that Chipasula…

This week, we're highlighting contemporary Austrian critic and essayist Karl-Markus Gauss's meditation on perception and control, “Wie das Chaos nach Salzburg kam,” (“When Chaos…

Upcoming Events: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Legacy America's Society Friday, October 23 7:00 pm Free admission As a follow-up to the Fall 2009 symposium marking the 400th anniversary of Inca…

“This is not a novel,” wrote Diderot repeatedly, in his Quixotic, polyphonic Jacques the Fatalist and his Master. You could say he was ripping off Sterne, who ripped off Rabelais in the grand…

The National Book Critics Circle's blog, Critical Mass, is featuring a three-part series of podcasts and videos to cover the complete symposium held last week at NYU: After Kapuściński: The Art of…

This month, Andre Naffis brings us the third installment in his Poeboes series of podcasts for the WWB blog. In his latest dispatch. Andre speaks to writer Aamir Hussein.Aamer Hussein (1955– ),…

Although André Brink is one of South Africa’s leading Afrikaans-language writers, and although his work has appeared in English, at least one article has questioned whether we can categorize…

This week, we are highlighting an excerpt from Towers of Stone, by Wojciech Jagielski, translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger. The book is forthcoming this month from Seven Stories Press, and is a…

The Nobel Prize With the announcement of Herta Müller as Nobel Prize winner for literature comes the continued sense that the Nobel committee is challenging the English-speaking world to be more…

Dear reader: I need your help.Lately I’ve been reading a lot of African memoirs: books like Echoes of an Autobiography by Naguib Mahfouz, An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie,…

This week, we are highlighting an excerpt from journalist-cum-fiction writer Peter Fröberg Idling’s Pol Pots leende (Pol Pot’s Smile), translated from the Swedish by Silvester MazzarellaFirst…

Recently, I traveled to Paris to assist my publisher there with the promotion of one of my novels that had been translated into French. Any excuse to visit Paris is a good excuse. It's easy to forget…

Kafka in New York Last week, the New York M.T.A. unveiled a new quote for their Train of Thought series, with the first line from Kafka's “The Metamorphosis.” The New Yorker suggests that…

Agur Schiff and Edward Gauvin, reading at a recent Words Without Borders event in Hudson, N My favorite piece of the week is a conversation between Michael Silverblatt, Álvaro Uribe and Cristina…

Rows of skulls. Simple and incomprehensible.

this is how the clan defrauds the fruit dump[...]

Evil wears no gloves.

I made a habit of visiting the refugees in the train standing in the middle of nowhere, outside the village of Karabulak.

He was alone with a bottle of red wine, looking grim.

Pentecost, the peaceful holiday, had come, and Salzburg was something akin to a city under a state of emergency.

As images of the bloody crackdown by government militias and plainclothes policemen on the peaceful demonstrations were broadcast after the controversial results of the tenth presidential elections in…