Gela, my odd Gela, a provincial soul in an overgrown urban body, a clash of ancient and modern.

Literature and, inevitably, theater, have belonged to Siracusa since its Greek colonization.

Palermo moves a lot but hardly budges.

In this corner of Europe, so many places have a humanist significance that’s truly contemporary, made of beauty and nature, in harmony with global change.

It must be an effect of the light, but Rome can be a maze . . .

Our staff, contributors, and board members share their favorite translated books of the year and the titles they're looking forward to in 2023.

Join the editors of the World Kid Lit blog on a tour of their favorite international children's books of 2022, from picture books to YA fiction and graphic novels.

In celebration of #WorldKidLitMonth, Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp recommends 12 international books for young readers with an interest in world history.

The way the sunset sometimes Tiepolos the clouds.

Hypocrite that I am, I never acknowledged my true self out of cowardice, out of fear of being misunderstood, and, more than anything else, because I thought if they knew what I was, they’d despise me.

We must be careful not to equate the word echo with simple repetition, and it speaks to me personally, acutely, about what it means to shift from writer to translator and back again.

In the third scene we talk / motionless across a screen in the ether

The microphones of Radio Antenna Capri are rapt witnesses to a minor page of modern history—even if the chapter of history in question is the saga of the Neapolitan gasconade, not the annals of the pop beat.

It is all the more disturbing, then, that neither Gyllenhaal in her interviews nor the film’s end credits or press kit makes any mention of the translator whose work was the basis for the script: Ann Goldstein.

But if you drink and breathe and sweat and love in a country that is no longer yours, then you are not a migrant. You are a man.

I have come to think of any “definitive text” largely the same way that I think of a mother tongue, at least in my case: an inherently debatable, perpetually relative concept.

Engaging the evolving dialogue that broadens definitions of global Blackness.

Naples is the city of a hundred cities, of a hundred satellites all orbiting the unique, massive planet that is memory.

I practiced the art of clairvoyance, / became a sorceress, a witch, a woman

I write to you from the red zone.

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

“The Devil at your service!” it announced in perfect Italian.

There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.

Some of the writers here document their own trips, while others invent characters and send them on the road.

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

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

Speculative fiction is alive and well in Italy.

He still loves her, so he complies. He runs the simulation all over again.

They’ve taken care of the medical expenses ever since “posthumous” became synonymous with “posthuman.”

Inside it floated a tiny infant, in every way like a human being, except for its minuscule, as yet featherless, wings.

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

They're not made to live in houses like we are.

This month, we bring you the first of three winning entries in the Words without Borders - Play for Voices Radio Drama Contest.

Many greet the clean slate of a new year by pledging to chalk up only virtue and moderation.

So You said to me, “What you are about to do, do quickly.”

Who is Italian, what is the Italian language, and who deserves to write in it?

He was fascinated with India: I represented its Italian branch, easily accessible.

Exile is accompanied by the idea of solitude.

“Trailers aren’t usually known to speak.”

on the atlas of my skin / your names

I stand like an African at the door of an entrance / that doesn’t exist.

I leave to my parents their portable country, so magnificent in their memory and in the stories they tell.

Your ruins no longer enchant me.

Why has the memory of this body of literature been so appallingly suppressed in Italy?

A black woman, in the regime’s view, simply could not be an Italian.

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

I neared a branch heavy with snow / bending under the grip of one of the crows.

Only a sign like a silent hiss remains from that time

Nights close / inside / my palm, / I touch you / and you are ink.

Thus the world is all coal and ashes. / My pots and pans don’t feed the hungry.

These poets are surrounded by a poetic tradition that has often regarded style and illusion as essential ends; consequently, they harness the suggestiveness and sensuousness of the Italian language in simultaneously familiar and original terms.

I’d never found the plant or flower that could serve as punctuation.

In hindsight, it couldn't have happened anywhere but here.

For very important murders, the consent of the commission is required.

The father could no longer tolerate the oddities of that son who was turning him into the laughingstock of Assisi.