if we collected all the tears / would it wash away the soot / resurrect the dead.

Even the moans of suffering that made me ache—I’ve stashed them away in a bag of old laments.

Books stand as a material resistance to dangerous, accelerating erasures of home, culture, language, art,” writes Preti Taneja.

Thanks to Nadya Siyam, a writer and former student of Dr. Refaat Alareer, we've compiled a list of the works that Alareer was most passionate about teaching to his students in Gaza.

In our books, hunger and bread are synonyms, / light and darkness all broken shards.

For Refaat, teaching was more than just a job; it was a dynamic and transformative experience for himself and for his students.

For as long as Palestinians have resisted their occupiers, a companion narrative questioning our very existence, a profoundly dehumanizing narrative rooted in the West’s still unexamined anti-Arab racism, has also thrived, writes Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

Sitting in front of the screen, my thoughts resemble a bombed hospital.

After a dozen or so bombings, Jahid, like my mother had before him, decided we would flee.

WWB staff members share their favorite translated books of the year and the titles they're most looking forward to in 2024.

New this month: Tobias Carroll recommends eco-dystopia, a modern picaresque, innovative autofiction, and more, translated from Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese.

For Women in Translation Month, a dozen translators recommend recent favorite books written and translated by women.

Gaza is the soil where the tree of my consciousness and enlightenment has grown.

In a world of enforced transparency and readability, Jericho provides lush and deep gardens where no one can find you.

Translation, an obsessive interpretive art in which the boundaries between guest and host are tenderly and strenuously unstable, is my constant companion while I learn what it means to build a life in a country and culture different from the one I was…

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.

Ten recent books in translation that the readers in your life are sure to enjoy this holiday season.

Tobias Carroll recommends exciting new books in translation from Denmark, Argentina, Palestine, Mexico, and Poland.

I stood in the red church, / its tiny domes like buds / blossoming in stone

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

Recent and forthcoming poetry in translation from Mexico, South Korea, Croatia, Haiti, and more.

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

While Arabic publishing has historically focused on literature for adults and young children, recent years have seen an increasing number of titles aimed at a young adult readership.

Who ever heard of a fisherwoman in Gaza, much less a young girl?

An orphan named Noor receives a mysterious gift from her grandmother in this excerpt from Sonia Nimr’s YA novel Thunderbird.

Khidr stepped out onto the street and was filled with an extraordinary horror.

One cannot write about real-life experiences from the place of the “I” without laying claim to a place in the world.

I was a woman: young, alone, divorced, left without a guardian or virtue, meaning that in society’s eyes I was an easy target.

This issue is not a departure but a continuation.

We inherit memory the way we inherit the color of our eyes and skin.

In the current environment of relentless political strife . . . debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface.

There were a lot of weapons being brandished, a lot of threats being shouted, and there was a lot of waiting around. The intifada uprising shifted from the streets onto the TV.

To comprehend Palestinian literature, we must have an idea of what it is to be Palestinian today.

Memory—they tell me—has no translation.

Palestinian writer Atef Abu Saif reads from his work.

“You’re not going to fool around with your friend’s girlfriend.”

One day / I’ll tear off my lips / and eat them / like candy.

The older I get, the more I realize how hybridized my cultural identity is.

The phantoms behind the white sheet were moving more quickly now.

Eyad Barghuthy finds an undefeated young boxer knocked out by politics.

Their poems reach me from their temple

A Stone-Age hand a paperback Koran

It terrified me to hear the words “honor” and “flesh” in the same sentence.

Words Without Borders introduces Manal Al-Sheikh and Mazen Maarouf, two poets living in exile in Scandinavia.

But we run up against / the stone slab over our bodies

I roll my pierced heart / across the bedcover

a stray bullet / veered slightly off course

What hurts me in all this is that my parents will be forced to bury me before themselves.

They returned…

. . . then the sun began to set.

“Like many Arab novelists and poets, he has turned to the essay.”—Ahdaf Soueif

A young man, an eternal invalid, loved a girl, but she was merely fond of him.

Perhaps it is merely a clever joke, but it has become a story, everybody's story.

He discovered suddenly that Gaza had a sea—a big sea too.

For the Israelis, these hours were needed so that each and every returnee would understand the truth they wanted understood: you are coming to place yourself under our heel.