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

“Do you know what your grandmother’s mother did to avoid being subjected to speaking Japanese at school? She sliced off part of her own tongue.”

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

Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books from Cameroon, Mexico, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and Kazakhstan.

Tobias Carroll recommends noteworthy new books translated from Ukrainian, Indonesian, Persian, Japanese, and Spanish.

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

Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books in translation from Mexico, Norway, Haiti, Argentina, and Japan.

When do the provocative girlie girls turn into discreet wives who put on conservative dresses?

They’re as naked as the day they were born

The wisdom gathered from those wanderings is far deeper / Than that of ancient Greece

What has the coronavirus taken from us? We need to answer this in a way that isn’t expressed through numbers.

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

Firstclaw’s love spells were rumored to be unusually effective.

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

It all began about the time that the men and women were finishing their first drinks.

They were the hands of someone who had never heard of hand cream.

Even after the credits stopped rolling and the blue government warning turned into a blizzard of static, Katsuya kept staring at the screen, a vague grin on his face.

What these authors share, as insiders to the Japanese language, is a firsthand perspective on a culture whose monoethnic self-image often excludes them by default.

My reticence and my incompetence troubled me more than my appearance, but most intolerable was my unluckiness.

Four writer/translator teams work together to create a single story in multiple languages.

Ashbery fetched me a drink. I got drunk fast. And what did I prattle on about? The art of translation!

This issue is not a departure but a continuation.

“Roadkill’s something you get used to seeing in America”

Though food may fail to broker communication, this is often one of its major supposed roles.

Day in and day out, so many personal habits can drive us crazy.

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

It didn’t take much time before word spread that I was Yamamoto’s favorite.

Ghosts and all they represent lurk perennially in the universal consciousness and in literature around the world.

Perhaps she wanted her own fires to burn

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

No Japanese person would call a cat Thomas Jefferson.

I hated how Margarita cracked her knuckles when it was her turn to play the piano.

We have recently been made increasingly aware of the everyday failings of our own memories.

In Yoko Tawada's dystopian tale, the entire Japanese archipelago is rendered uninhabitable when a fighter plane piloted by a teenager loses control and crashes into a recently reactivated nuclear plant.

And then what did you do, he asked, and she said, I watched.

We simply couldn’t tolerate rogue fruit infiltrating Tokyo and corrupting public morals.

When you hold an egg in your hand, its memories are communicated to you through its shell, you know.

The fragments of the girl come tumbling down.

I watch the city lose its shape like a dripping watercolor.

Not once in his bowling alley had he heard that special, unforgettable sound.

The bus stop by the train station had moved. It was further away.

The flowers depicted, which must have differed from one to the next, are also hazy.

No matter how old I become, I will still go on like this, not knowing.

The appeal of the Queer Issue is in seeing that great ambition writ small, in discovering the swarm of details and experience that cohere into the big picture of world writing.

It was almost Christmas, I had a cavity, and I was in the process of getting dumped.

If you’re there, come to me. I’ll speak for you.

“These last few summonings . . . you haven’t been faking it, have you?”

One day, when he went home after a long absence, he found the apartment empty.

“They say that virgins make the best mediums so you don’t need to worry about me.”

My hands rose high above my head and crashed down onto the tatami mat with terrible force.

“I’m telling you, Mom, there’s no poltergeist.”

It was Yoko who made me become a fake medium six months ago.

By the middle of July, things were back to normal. Tokyo was hell.

“Even if we were to remove the crow’s feet, there's still the overall balance of your face to consider.”

I began to realize how disgracefully I was behaving.