right in the center, / sat the completely empty dharma throne, / richly decorated, the heart’s dream waiting / like a balloon floating through desire

my body, / like a spoon, here on this earth, sweetly scoops out / my brain.

I dare not use mortal eyes to contemplate you

Yes, there was a shadow there.

Dan believed it had all started going wrong when they took away his keys.

Food banks are one of the country’s main industries now; having replaced actual banks, who fled the island like rats from a sinking ship.

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.From Counterpoint Press | Inhabitation by Teru…

In Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s History. A Mess., translated by Lytton Smith and forthcoming from Open Letter Books, a PhD student uncovers information about the first documented professional…

From certain vantage points you can see the bones of the old city. Graying old buildings. Brickworks. Row houses stacked up on the hill.

Personal pronouns are just that: personal. They are intimately tied to how we present ourselves, or assert ourselves, in a heteronormative binary world. Many of us don't question the identity assigned…

I am old enough to remember when creative writing was something you “couldn’t teach” and was considered by the academy to be a less than legitimate area of study. (Journalism didn’t…

Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections in Arabic, a translator, and a literary scholar whose research is offering new critical perspectives on feminist novels in the Arab Gulf. She…

Each month, Tobias Carroll shares a handful of recently released or forthcoming titles in translation that he’s especially excited about.From Seagull Books | Ice by Sonallah Ibrahim,…

Bangalore was a small, sleepy cantonment town that woke up one day to find it had become a booming metropolis.

As you may have noticed, we’re celebrating our tenth Queer issue. WWB has always published queer work, of course: there was the Spanish writer Andrés Barba’s sorrowful long story “Nocturne,”…

So J. Lee’s translation of Lee Hyemi’s “The Cupboard with Strawberry Jam” from Unexpected Vanilla appears in this month’s Queer issue. After a year of emailing back and forth,…

이혜미의 시 <딸기잼이 있던 찬장>의 영문 번역이 Words without Borders 이번…

What brings people together isn’t language. If anything, when times are hard, shared language can deepen divisions.

I slept poorly while translating Geovani Martins’s O sol na cabeça, waking up repeatedly in the wee hours of the night, a solution to a thorny problem on the tip of my tongue, alarm…

Nothing exists outside Bombay. From the moment you get off the plane, you know you have entered a room full of mirrors: everything is self-referential.

The following is excerpted from Emiliano Monge’s Among the Lost (translated by Frank Wynne), winner of the 2016 English PEN Award and out tomorrow from Scribe US. Set in an unnamed land that could…

Now, thanks to our authors, we’re ready to step forth into the sun.

Caught off guard, we were laughably weak.

I heard that their overflowing hormones made them dangerously seductive.

All the pieces are told in the first person, lending intimacy and immediacy to the events they describe.

If I had a spare season, I would’ve rushed to whisper vulgar words

It's not very clear to me if he was asking for help or wanting me to leave them alone.

Perhaps I’m not ready yet to plan out my entire future, but right now these are the arms I need around me.

Oh, Master Song, who would have guessed your heart was hard as steel?

This night sealed, consecrated, my future as a writer absolutely.