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.                                                                      …

Rafik Schami was born in Damascus in 1946, came to Germany in 1971, and studied chemistry in Heidelberg. Today he is the most successful German-speaking Arabic writer. His novels have been translated…

Born in Damascus, the poet and novelist Aïcha Arnaout has lived in Paris since 1978. We have had quite a few conversations over the past few years, often at the Marché de la Poésie,…

Jonathan Blitzer: “The Writer of Memories,” the story we’ve published in this issue of the magazine, is the first one to appear in your book of stories, Párrafos Sueltos (2003).…

Elisabeth Daldoul founded her publishing house, Elyzad, in Tunisia almost six years ago. My first experience with her was with A cinq mains, a book in which she published five short stories written by…

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…

Jonathan Blitzer:  In this issue of the magazine, we’ve published your story “The Night Sucks (La noche sucks),” which later became the novel of the same name.  You have never considered yourself…

Jonathan Blitzer:  You have written three books of poems, two short-story collections, and three novels.  But for the first part of your career—and while you lived in Granada, where you…

Jonathan Blitzer: The stories that appear in La Prisionera, which you have recently presented here in Madrid, take place in the imaginary city of Pampa Hundida, which also exists in your novels. What…

In our second installment in WWB's Our Man in Madrid series, Jonathan Blitzer speaks to Jorge Eduardo Benavides, whose story "The Reckoning" appears in the March issue of the magazine. Read…

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…

photo by Daniel  MordzinskiIn the first installment in WWB’s Our Man in Madrid series, Jonathan Blitzer speaks to Juan Carlos Chirinos, whose story “Ride of the Valkyries” appears…

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.…

(Pescasseroli, Easter 2005)To meet with Dacia Maraini and speak with her in peace means going up to the bitter and severe lands of Abruzzo where the writer, who lives in Rome, takes refuge during holidays…

By Nicole Rudick The appeal of some translated works lies in their ability to relate specific events to a broad foreign audience. Others operate in reverse, projecting a nonspecific vantage that…

I met Michiel Heyns—author, translator, and professor of English at Stellenbosch University from 1987 until 2003—last year when he was here in the U.S. as a visiting professor at the University of Tulsa,…

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

How did you find the pieces you included in the Iran section of Literature from the “Axis of Evil”? Isn’t it next to impossible to find out who the great writers are from the countries…

How did you select the Cuban pieces for the anthology, Literature from the “Axis of Evil”?I combed through Cuban print and Internet literary journals*Š and I spoke with translators……

How easy was it for you, living in Seoul, to find work for the North Korea section of Literature from the “Axis of Evil” ?Because there are very few North Korean publications available to…

Ellen Stewart founded the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Company in 1961, and her groundbreaking vision helped establish the careers of Sam Shepard, Philip Glass, Harvey Fierstein, Robert Wilson, Mabou Mines,…

Q. Here we are in Sarri , Barcelona, your birthplace and the scenario for your previous two novels. How come you decided to set your most recent novel, Queen Cocaine, in Colombia, between Bogotá and the…

Boris Fishman interviewed Wladimir Kaminer September 3, 2003.Boris Fishman: Did you start writing before emigrating to Germany? What did you do in the Soviet Union?Wladimir Kaminer: In the Soviet Union,…

This interview appeared in slightly different form in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited and translated by Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996).Ammiel Alcalay: Starting with…

An exile's life is unstable. Ruled by fear, especially when you're so deeply involved with a language.

Prose is like a window; fiction is like a door. But it is not uncommon that he who should come in through the door jumps in through the window.