Photo: Barry Domínguez Ana Clavel is considered one of the most prominent writers of her generation in Latin America. Her novel Las ninfas a veces sonríen (Nymphs Sometimes Smile),…

In the Beginning Was the Sea is Colombian writer Tomás González’s first novel, written in 1983 and only recently published for the first time in English by Pushkin Press (in Frank…

Alberto Mussa was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1961. After graduating in Mathematics, he studied Linguistics at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University and earned his master’s degree with a thesis titled…

Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For November's installment,…

Iván Repila (Bilbao, 1978) is a writer, editor and cultural events manager. He is the co-founder of the press Masmédula Ediciones, which specializes in poetry. Iván has worked for…

Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For August's installment, Alta…

Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For August's installment, Allison…

Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For July's installment,…

Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For May's installment,…

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

Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For March's installment,…

Our “Translator Relay” series features a new interview each month. This month's translator will choose the next interviewee, adding a different, sixth question. For December's installment,…

“I wanted to write a happy book; really, really happy—and this is what came out,” Lebanese writer Rabih Alameddine said of his new novel, An Unnecessary Woman, at a reading at the Asian…

In short, the ongoing war in Syria is not a revolution.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a medium who brings ghosts back from the past.”

With the process of democratization the role of poetry has been curtailed.

Dealing with censorship is a game of hide and seek.

Each text requires a different voice, a different English.

Zygmunt Miłoszewski is a Polish novelist, journalist, and editor, currently working as a columnist for Newsweek.  Born in Warsaw in 1976, he is the author of several books across a variety of…

China is a great environment for an author, because such implausible things happen in everyday life.

There is indeed no place like China–but that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

The Mexican literary world is in crisis as it tries to face the history of the present.

Rutu Modan is a rarity. One of the few established comics artists in Israel, she is also one of the few established female comics artists in the world. After graduating from Bezalel Academy of Art and…

It has different faces as well as various paces; fast and unbearable during the day, colorful and wild at night.

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.                                                                      …

Syria was the first Arab republic to pass on power by inheritance.

Can we write a revolt when it is still under way?

Only time, the persistence of works in time, their readings after ten, fifty, or a thousand years will say if the edifice was constructed with strong, durable, or perishable materials.

The Tunisian Revolution has opened new perspectives to explore that would have been unthinkable only a few months ago.

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.                                                              …

In her latest dispatch for our Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine series, Azareen Van der Vliet speaks to Raji Bathish, a Palestinian poet, novelist, screenplay writer and cultural activist born in Nazareth.…

Just hold my hands tightly. I won’t force you to kiss me or do anything.

In late April, Abdellah Taïa arrives in New York City for the seventh annual PEN World Voices Festival. Two days before he is to sit down in conversation with Dale Peck for an interview hosted by PEN…

I would like to write as if I were in a passing car, with the radio on, which is one of the most delectable sensations I know.

Cutting through the inane shrubbery means, first off, not writing books that aren’t necessary.

It is a well established fact that we know our own countries better from afar.

I have realized that when a writer emigrates, it takes much longer for him to arrive as a writer than as a person.

In February 2008, WWB published an extract from the first Egyptian graphic novel for adults, Magdy El Shafee's Metro. Set in a chaotic modern Cairo pulsing with economic and social instability, the…

What began in 1997 as an academic “excursion” became a kind of immigration experience and now seems to have turned into an indisguisable exile

In her latest dispatch for our Artists Talk: Israel/Palestine series, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi speaks to visual artist Till Roeskens, whose documentary film Videomappings: Aida, Palestine won the…

There is an interesting trend right now where Cretan teenagers and hipster twentysomethings send each other text messages in fifteen-syllable iambic lines.

Last week, Rohan and I sat down with Alex Epstein who was in New York City visiting from Tel Aviv. We had a very nice discussion on his book, Blue has no South, on mythology, angels, Jorge Luis Borges…

How did you begin writing The Fool, and what motivated you to tell this particular story?

Alina Bronsky, a German writer of Russian origin, immigrated to Germany when she was thirteen, and published her first novel, Broken Glass Park, in 2008 when she was only thirty years old. The novel was…

Samuel Shimon (1956 – ) is an Assyrian writer, filmmaker, editor and anthologist. Born in Al-Habbaniyah, Iraq, he left his country in 1979. Over the years, he has lived in Damascus, Amman, Beirut,…

The interview was conducted at the AWP Annual Conference on Saturday, April 10, 2010 in Denver, where Keret was one of the main featured presenters. On Friday night, April 9, Keret read together with…

This interview with Laura Healy, translator of Roberto Bolaño's poetry, is part of our month long look at international poetry and celebration of the release of The Ecco Anthology of International…

In addition to her freelance writing for the New Yorker’s Goings On About Town and her frequent forays into dance criticism, Marina Harss is also a versatile and prolific translator from French, Spanish,…

Weiss: What was your first time out of the country?Topol: My first time was in East Germany with my mom. She took my brother and me to the seaside there. That change—all of a sudden by the sea in the…

I was nobody, like a piece of sesame in a big pot of soup.

Over 800 pages and eleven years in the making, A Drifting Life is a monumental achievement and the long-waited autobiography of legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Called the father of gekiga—realistic…

Adam Rovner interviews Etgar Keret as part of WWB’s month-long discussion of Etgar Keret’s Girl on the Fridge. You can find links to other posts and essays in this series at the bottom of…

A few simple descriptions would suffice to understand just how rich and strange an artwork Waltz with Bashir truly is: an animated documentary film

Algeria was imploding into civil war in 1993 when Amara Lakhous, born in 1970 in Algiers, wrote his first novel.

Buket Uzuner: I met Claire Messud in Istanbul in November 2007 while she was visiting the city as one of the guest writers of the Istanbul Book Fair. A week before I met her, I started to read her very…

Drake Stutesman: Yalo is interesting for the various different voices that it employs, and the ways in which it combines vernaculars, languages and perspectives into a single narrative. What do you think…

In this interview, we speak about some of the predominant themes in Esterházy's literature, particularly family and language.

Between 2003 and 2004, Valentina Polukhina conducted a series of interviews about Nobel Prize in Literature recipient Joseph Brodsky. She spoke with former Brodsky student and executive director of The…

1. How did you discover Walser, and what first inspired you to undertake a translation of his work?Two of my friends, T. and M., love Walser very much. I can’t remember which of them first spoke…

1. How did you discover Walser, and what first inspired you to undertake a translation of his work?On first coming across Walser in graduate school I found his voice beguiling and, at times, infuriating.…