I had the look of a Westerner fresh off the boat, with my wrinkled trousers, tourist backpack, and it didn’t tally with my fluency in Kinyarwanda.

Tobias Carroll recommends new and exciting books in translation from Lebanon, China, Spain, Japan, and France.

The transworld was so beautiful, so vast! There was so much to explore!

Tobias Carroll recommends noteworthy new books translated from Arabic, Chinese, Danish, French, and Japanese.

It's your skin I feel sliding beneath my soapy palms.

This game of comparisons, while not always accurate, can open doors and be thought-provoking.

Not a day goes by that I don't go back to Tiananmen Square.

These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.

Robert Louis Stevenson says that to tour lighthouses is “to visit past centuries.”

I often feel that adults forget what children’s stories are capable of.

But it’s not surprising—with everything you hear on the news, how can anyone be expected to think well of the Chinese?

These artists capture both words and images to convey narratives individual and collective.

He's touching me.

The pieces here map the translation of event into prose—the creation of true crime writing.

Like most gruesome crimes, the case also reveals something of society's ills.

The results of these confrontations range from triumphant to catastrophic as the boundaries between worlds dissolve.

A general who has dreams, that much they’d put up with, but a general who sees ghosts?

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

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

When we think of translating humor, we may think in terms of capturing jokes.

Why was he the one with the keys to Michel Foucault’s apartment?

One shouldn’t expect more from novelists than disjointed emanations without guaranteed outcomes.

The comparison of Buenos Aires to Paris is an image of desire.

Though much of the art here may be in black and white, the topics addressed are anything but.

In April 1991, Saddam Hussein took back control of his country in its entirety.

These writers have migrated geographically and, in some cases, linguistically.

Boulevard Barbès, Rochechouart, like a film clip, Arabs, blacks, half-whites.

Because punk is made so people like you will look at people like me.

I was the daughter of a tainted man.

“Why? Wasn’t there a guava tree at the other guy’s place?”

You don’t become a war correspondent by accident or by chance.

The narrative threads that weave through the last ten years tell a tale in themselves.

What I’m pointing out here is a typical media phenomenon born of social conditioning.

Lots of stranges aren't here legally.

This number is your identity.

Fifteen years later, I was the one who left.

This river of misery lulls his senses.

I completely ruined my father.

After Batista's dictatorship, Castro had the support of an entire people.

Dump trucks from the Department of Public Safety came for the bodies.

You let Jews into your home? The people who killed your brother!

You look away. The yolk’s yellow circle reminds you of an eye.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a medium who brings ghosts back from the past.”

The throng was slowly making for the two officers, a clash close at hand.

The Eiffel Tower cries electricity.

The dead need no more space / than a mouth from its lipstick.

The silken flesh, the acrid peat merge / on this urban curbside

My bones have beautiful remains

Look, seriously, he's gonna make you rewrite it ten times.

It's the good stuff. Afghani.

That night, it was a Ford that stopped.

To write an Oulipian text is both to draw a picture and to solve a puzzle.

Hear Haydn’s cry at the court of the Prince, and his symphony.

Committing blasphemy’s no parlor game.

in the basement she coughs then lights a smoke