Its name, “the city of thousands,” is synonymous with multitude.

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

The desert is the shoulder of the city.

Oxford is one hidden city layered over another.

Doek! Literary Magazine, Namibia’s first online literary magazine, was named Brittle Paper's Literary Platform of the Year on Monday. It was founded in 2019 by Rémy…

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

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

In recent years, a proliferation of books in translation for children and young adults has brought imaginative stories from around the world to new readers. We’re speaking with some of the extraordinary…

The city has devoured itself over and over again.

They’ve read and admired one another for ages, but they’d never had an occasion to talk to each other. Emmanuel Carrère and Daniel Mendelsohn are among those writers who, over the past…

When Stéphane Larue’s The Dishwasher won the 2020 Amazon.ca First Novel Award (formerly the Books in Canada First Novel Award), it was the first translated novel selected in the prize’s…

Tang Fei (the pen name of Wang Jing) was born in 1983 in Shanghai. She is well known as a writer of science fiction and fantasy and is also a literary critic and essayist. Tang Fei was one of our star…

Athens is about instant decisions, constant change, boldness and confusion and nerve.

“Birds in Flight, 1965” by Enrique Villasis, translated from Filipino by Bernard Capinpin, was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented…

Lebanese comics artist and musician Mazen Kerbaj first appeared in Words Without Borders in February 2008, in our second graphic novel issue. Since then he’s contributed six more pieces, most recently…

“Trial Run” by Yau Ching, translated from Chinese by Chenxin Jiang, was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented in partnership with the Academy…

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

Bryan Mendoza’s translation of Julio Pazos Barrera's “Pegasus Autopsy” was one of four winners of WWB’s 2020 Poems in Translation contest, presented in partnership…

London is a self-enclosed world that contains all worlds.

Making texts that are potentially wrong or slippery keeps me heedful of officious frames of correctness.

Carlos Fonseca's Natural History (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is a singularly difficult book to describe. It’s always hard to sum up an entire novel in a few words, but this one…

September is World Kid Lit Month—a celebration of translated literature for young people. We invited World Kid Lit advocate and children’s book translator Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp to tell us about…

Damián Cabrera is a Paraguayan writer, researcher, teacher, cultural manager, and curator. He is the author of the lyric novels Xirú (2012) and Xé (2019). He lives…

Usually there is no time to be moody, only the slap and the dash and the drill and the dig, you dig?

Even if Salerno is blessed with sunshine, many things happen in the twilight.

Car horns suddenly transformed into instruments of emotion, sirens of mourning.

In the essay “The Poem as a Field of Action,” presented as a lecture at the University of Washington in 1948, William Carlos Williams argues that after the Industrial Revolution, a different…

Something is always about to happen.

 WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different,…

Old Mughal monuments stand at ease with glass-and-steel office towers.

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

Today WWB launches its new series Close-Up: An Experiment in Reviewing Translation, a response to the dearth of book reviews that take translators and translation into account. In the conversation…

Last week, NYRB Classics released Padma Viswanathan's translation of São Bernardo, a classic novel by early twentieth-century Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos. Today on WWB…

Amanda Michalopoulou's latest novel, God's Wife, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in Patricia Felisa Barbeito's translation late last year. In today's interview, the author…

For me, there is no Algeria, only Annaba, where the Barbary coast yawns out.

The Paris I grew to love isn’t gone, but right now it is shutting down.

WWB’s Translator Relay features an interview with a different translator every few months. The current month’s translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth…

Returning to Lisbon means savoring another delectable local delicacy: the mouthwatering Portuguese language with its varied assortment of vowels.

Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero, Ariana Harwicz, and Alejandro Zambra, and publishers…

There is a permanent solace in the knowledge that you can’t be the weirdest person in this city.

Turkish writer, musician, and human rights activist Zulfu Livaneli talks about his latest novel to appear in English, Serenade for Nadia (translated by Brendan Freely), out from Other Press on March 3.Zulfu…

There is another life that unfolds in this low-lying area at the foot of the seven hills.

An excerpt from Barrack Rima's graphic novel Beirut Trilogy appears in WWB's current issue of graphic literature in translation. In conversation with translators Alexandra Gueydan-Turek…

When I bought my copy of Comemadre by Argentine novelist Roque Larraquy, the bookseller looked up at me from behind the cash register and said, “Be prepared—this book blew my wife’s…

Returning to Rome makes the blood rush in unpredictable ways.

There’s no forgetting that we’re on an island at the bottom of the Pacific, looking up, heading into the morning while much of the world is still making its way through the day we just left behind.

Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and…

Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and…

Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and…

Victor Meadowcroft attended the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he interviewed writers María Fernanda Ampuero and Ariana Harwicz, and publishers Diego Rabasa (Sexto Piso) and…

Toledo is a city marked with scratches, indentations, ashes of other cities, shadows, fugitive trails, clouds of smoke, dust, and slamming doors.

Elizabeth Lowe’s translation of an excerpt from Brazilian writer João Paulo Cuenca’s I Found Out I Was Dead appears in the current issue of international true crime writing. Lowe…

Is it possible to ever fully outgrow the place that first left its mark on you? The town, city, or village where you lived for the first fifteen years of your life?

Amman consumes me when I’m there and it can feel like an entire world. It demands so much attention even as it grumbles about its own frustrations.

Jeffrey Zuckerman’s translations of Ananda Devi’s The Living Days (The Feminist Press) and Shenaz Patel’s Silence of the Chagos (Restless Books) were both released this week. Through…

In anticipation of City Lights’s publication of Silvina Ocampo’s Forgotten Journey (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan) and The Promise (tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell),…

Igor Štiks was born in Sarajevo, fled to Croatia with his family during the war, and now lives in Belgrade. He writes about citizenship in former and post-Yugoslavia and is the author of two novels, A…

The moment you think that you know Abidjan, the city escapes your embrace.

The place that keeps having me back, its moonless nights, its raucous urban sea, anonymous and also memory-crammed, people- and ghost-filled.

If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.—Italo Calvino, Invisible…