The mother sheep would warn her children of the wolf that prowled the town.

She struggled and fought back and tried to save herself but could not overcome the great crocodile that had taken hold of her.

It happened so quickly. The End.

Contrary to the epic, totalizing, and politically engaged narratives of the Latin American Boom, the scope of the stories here is narrow, intimate, more local than ever before.

Days before my dad set the house on fire, there was a sheet drying bit by bit.

I would have ironed my own hands had I not needed them to iron.

It was impossible to talk to a dead man, so I talked to her instead.

The hearth is a fire that’s always being extinguished.

Nobody couldn’t have a belly button.

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.

And I neither want nor can forget what I once felt from your gaze.

Gabrielle Sauriol lies in the Pacific Ocean now.

It's vile to disregard somebody's sense of aesthetics just because they're dead.

The clown had put the platter of coke on his head, like a waiter carrying a tray.

All people mourn in their own ways.

I can’t sit up any more, she said. I can only lie in bed.

The technological age regulates social relations with its robotic fingers, and it does not give a damn about your naturally noble spirit.

Who needs Kazakh? We are moving to Russia anyway.

It was the old grandmas themselves, each and every one of them, who were most interesting to me.

Kazakhstan is the largest country by landmass to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union aside from Russia itself, but it has had an undersized impact on world literature.

She searched for an answer, embarrassed for the first time in her life at having to say what she was about to.

“Have you been able to forget me?”

I cannot serve a glass of water to a Brahmin’s son.

It was late. Who knew where Bhootnath could buy liquor at this hour?

Arunava Sinha introduces the four stories in our December feature exploring Bollywood’s debt to Bengali writers.India’s Hindi film industry is the largest in the world in terms of the number…

They didn’t get any satisfaction from coming out.

The realities of life in Indochina had nothing in common with those of France.

That piece of junk is driving me crazy!

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

Taxi drivers are indiscreet types.

Sculpted from the blood of mothers and the water of children, their hands birth a piece of Brazil.

This is a tiny country famed for its happy cows, football fanatics, and melancholy.

The writers in this month’s feature provide assurance that the genre is source of some of today’s most vibrant and compelling stories, fictional or otherwise.

I was convinced that I really had caused the death of the one I loved most.

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

It hadn’t been a gastronomic experience so much as an obstacle course.

The asado and political violence are linked in Argentina.

Israeli cuisine is a mystery, a black hole, a utopia.

Whereas shelter and safety must come first, the question of food is so fundamental.

The most astonishing thing about these men was their ability to eyeball measurements.

I had never before paid so much attention to the act of eating.

I have always thought it a gastronomical barbarity to eat bacalao fresh.

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

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

Why did he have to sleep with his bride?

“It’s the spirits, girl, it’s the spirits.”

The female branches made off with the laundry on our lines

And try to imagine what we will never know for sure: what old grudge (since it did not stem from us) and what precise urgency are at the root of everything that is going to happen today

I carried everything I had. It wasn't actually mine.

Nouri Gana talks to Hisham Mattar about poetry, beards, and his novel In the Country of Men.

Heaven rains down bread in little hard crumbs of dough, and whoever catches them may either become happy or choke on them.

The first pride Rosa felt on this day was for herself.

Anyone's death is a great tragedy.