“If Kowsar’s education is of no use to her and of no importance to you,” Teacher Sadeq says sharply, “then why did you send her to school?”

Could a Black man really have become a knight of the Order of Santiago?

disease came dwelling / now it eats my bread

No one knows what Beijing West will look like tomorrow.

When did you know / what you / were?

They were marching along a man with his hands tied behind his back and a tall paper hat on his head.

She has an innocence, a purity of mind like a delicate glass vessel, untainted by soiled ideas or thoughts.

With no one around me but people who were prisoners of their land, I had suddenly come across someone who was free.

Though the girl’s mom had died five years earlier, her consciousness had been uploaded into a robot body with a tube-shaped head and a torso cluttered with silly refrigerator magnets.

Nuwayra, despite the precision of her intelligence reports, did not advance a satisfactory explanation for how Naima acquired this elephant.

There’s a Tibetan saying that an old man’s country is like an old bird’s nest.

It was highly unusual for him to be this late.

The German language felt like a conspiracy against my father.

I live on the lip, split / between slipping & holding

I can still hear her faltering voice today. My mother must have been the only one who had known what Konrad was planning.

She had seen the man make the sign for death, so she knew this was serious.

“You don't want to appear as the father, do you?”

I guess that’s one approach to pitching an encyclopedia sale.

Early the next morning, I got a call from Mom. The first words out of her mouth: Will you take me to the hospital today?

I thought I unburdened / myself / but even invisible / the braid grows / with memory

Just what she needed. An outing with a man just released from prison.

Love doesn’t exist before marriage, Ramla. It’s time you come back down to earth.

Grandma Susana wore long skirts, and she even drank vinegar to make her face paler, as a mortification of her beauty.

I was assigned to work in the propaganda group to recruit more people to our cause.

“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.”

Her mother was dead, she knew that, but she did not know why her aunt and her uncle were the ones who took her in.

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.

When they chucked me out in the middle of the goddamn winter, you gave me your coat and seven euros.

For weeks, Ma didn’t feel a shred of warmth for the baby.

I like to imagine that, in this defining moment, as my grandfather struggled with the dead man’s sinews, he was able to calm his rage for a moment and laugh.

As they drew nearer, knives in hand, Hilaire recognized the feverish eyes behind their scarves.

They stuffed these intoxicating little spheres into their mouths and kissed the juice off of the palms of their hands.

That’s how it felt to sleep handcuffed to a table.

Around the time we were in second grade, Buckethead and I beat a snake to death.

I felt uncomfortable being who I was, raised on the idea of being from a Black family.

Miguelángel Meza's poetry chapbook, Dream Pattering Soles, was published this month by Ugly Duckling Presse in Elisa Taber's translation. A leading Guaraní poet, Meza was…

Winner of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišić's Where You Come From will be out from Tin House next week. Translated by Damion Searls, this autofictional work explores…

Next week, Black Ocean will release Lee Young-ju's poetry collection Cold Candies, translated from Korean by Jae Kim. The collection includes “Roommate, Woman,” one of the winners…

Later this month, UEA Publishing Project will release Mo(a)t: Stories from Arabic, an anthology of short fiction by Arabophone writers from the African diaspora, edited by Garen Torikian and…

Edited and translated by Jozefina Komporaly, Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion is out today from Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. This unique transnational anthology…

Petra Hůlová's dystopian novel The Movement, translated from Czech by Alex Zucker, is available now from World Editions. The novel follows the narrator, a prison guard at…

Max Lobe's novel A Long Way from Douala, translated by Ros Schwartz, is out next month from Other Press. The novel follows the narrator, Jean, and his friend Simon, as they search for…

The River in the Belly, the second collection by award-winning poet Fiston Mwanza Mujila to appear in English, will be published by Deep Vellum next week in J. Bret Maney's translation. In short solitudes, including the two that appear below, Mujila…

Nataliya Deleva's debut novel, Four Minutes, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel, is out tomorrow from Open Letter. The book focuses on characters whose voices are often marginalized in…

In the 1990s, writer and Korean reunification activist Hwang Sok-yong spent five years in prison for visiting North Korea in violation of South Korea’s National Security Act. In his memoir The…

Originally published in 2017, Black Box, journalist Shiori Ito's memoir about her experience of sexual assault and her struggle to bring her attacker to justice, prompted a reckoning over gender-based…

Dulce Maria Cardoso's Violeta among the Stars, translated from Portuguese by Ángel Gurría-Quintana, is out this week from MacLehose Press. Cardoso's lyrical, stream-of-consciousness…

Ari Larissa Heinrich's translation of Chi Ta-wei's The Membranes, a classic of queer speculative fiction originally published in Taiwan in 1995, is out this week from Columbia University…

This week, Seagull Books publishes Wolves, a collection of short stories by Bhuwaneshwar (1910–57), who is often described as the father of the modern Hindi short story. Translated…

Anke Stelling's award-winning novel Higher Ground, translated from German by Lucy Jones, is out tomorrow from Scribe. An examination of class, friendship, and parenthood in contemporary…

The most recent novel by Palestinian writer Sahar Khalifeh, My First and Only Love, is out this week from Hoopoe. The book follows the protagonist, Nidal, as she returns to her family home in Nablus…

Fifty Sounds, Polly Barton’s memoir of moving to Japan, immersing herself in the language, and becoming a literary translator, is out tomorrow from Fitzcarraldo Editions. In the excerpt…

Today, Two Lines Press releases Elemental: Earth Stories, the third title in its Calico series. The collection features writing by eight international authors whose work explores humanity's…

Bekim Sejranović's From Nowhere to Nowhere, a novel about a young man displaced by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, is out tomorrow from Sandorf Passage in Will Firth's translation.…

György Dragomán's The Bone Fire, a Gothic novel about an orphan who's adopted by her mysterious grandmother, is out this week with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In the excerpt…