The Festival of New French Writing, held from last Thursday through Saturday at NYU’s Vanderbilt Hall, and presented by the French-American Cultural Exchange, was a remarkable series of programs…

The young captain sat on his bed and sighed. íThere are not too many people around here I can talk with,ë he said. íAll the young guys talk about is women and fighting.ëThis is…

Aya, written by Marguerite Abouet and illustrated by the French artist Clément Oubrerie, is a lively and colorful glimpse of life in Ivory Coast in the late 1970s, a time when the country was enjoying…

I remember the first time I came across Etgar Keret, and that I threw the book across the room. I had been beat to the punch. This marvel, this oracle, this as we say in Yiddish, this “meshuga”…

Our March installment of the Conversations on Great Contemporary Literature series will feature the work of Israeli author Etgar Keret. We’ll be hosting an online book club and are looking for readers…

Tayeb Salih was the most eminent writer from the largest country in Africa, yet as Leonard Lopate pointed out last year on a radio program called Underappreciated, his work was barely known in the U.S.…

Tomorrow, February 23rd, marks the beginning of a massive three-week festival of Arabic arts and culture at the Kennedy Center in D.C., titled Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World. This will, by far, be…

It’s interesting, in the backstretch of the book awards season, to consider a book’s merit in multiple phases. There’s the book itself, as created by the author and chosen by the publisher,…

If you've read Etgar Keret's stories you know they're as addicting as they are short. You probably find yourself retelling or even reading them to your friends. Well how about sharing your…

At The Reading Experience this past December, Dan Green defended the way in which he reads to analyze literature for its aesthetic aspects and “to open up the text in order to make its palpable…

In manga translation, the English rendition of the original Japanese has to fit back into a bubble, and the spatial constraints can be formidable given that one language reads top-down and the other left-right.…

Angel Wagenstein’s fiction is presented as a new approach to Jewish storytelling in an essay published in this weeks Nation. Issac’s Torch, published in English last year by Elizabeth Frank…

Walking into the rather cramped room, you will see among other items on the heavy desk, a much used Consul typewriter, an opened, slightly crumpled pack of cheap cigarettes, a couple of pencils, a coffee…

The Japanese language employs a mixture of phonetic scripts and ideograms. These latter, the Chinese or kanji characters, invariably take up more space than the original single glyph when rendered into…

Not long ago my partner Jenn and I were visited by a couple we first met in Brooklyn, but who later moved to Paris. John is a jazz trombonist from Montana. Ana is a Parisian actress and translator from…

In a new column for the WWB blogs, we will be reaching out to booksellers to let us know what their favorite new works in translation are and to speak a little about their choices. In our first post,…

Edith Grossman and Eduardo Lago at Idlewild Books, February 5, 2009Edith Grossman’s English translation of Don Quixote, published in 2003, is praised as an honest as well as accessible version of…

Not only has Esquire greatly reduced the print space alloted to literary fiction, but their short-lived Books Blog ground to a halt at the end of January. Still, it’s worth checking out their recent…

In his second post for our blog series on graphic novels this month, Yani Mentzas talks about ensuring quality in manga—in images and in words—and about the very physical constraints of translating…

Recently I had lunch with a friend of mine in Manhattan. We had not even finished our sandwiches when my friend received her first text message. Usually I find it annoying when somebody starts reading…

Each winter for the past ten years, BOMB magazine has featured what they call an Americas Issue, focusing on a specific region of Latin America and covering art, film, music, architecture, and literature.…

The annual AWP conference begins next Wednesday in Chicago, with perhaps some of the most interesting events off-site from the Hilton. Journals Mare Nostrum, Black Warrior Review, and Bat City combine…

In his first post for our Graphic Novels blog line-up, Yani Mentzas, Editorial Director of Vertical, Inc., the publisher of—among other great work—Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack series, talks…

The sand was everywhere. Not just under the miserable bed or in his bowl.

A few simple descriptions would suffice to understand just how rich and strange an artwork Waltz with Bashir truly is: an animated documentary film

He’s a pickpocket. I want his fingers to be agile enough he’ll be able to ‘work’ again.

The genius behind all those great works is sitting right next to me! Strange he doesn’t seem at all different from any other young guy…

Since the ideology and values conveyed in children’s books tend to be relatively transparent in all cultures, I hope this excerpt from Blizzard in the Jungle gives a useful glimpse into the self-representation…

I learned the lines of this noun / one bright day in the classroom.