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  Mordzinski In 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…

The Greek poet Dimitris Athinakis came of age with the new millennium.  Raised in a Greece of fast and cataclysmic change, he belongs to a new generation of writers whose works are bringing brave…

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…

This interview was conducted by email, in English and Polish, between 24 May and 1 June, 2010.   W. Martin: How did you begin writing The Fool (Głupiec), and what motivated you to tell this particular…

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,…

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…

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

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 the…

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…

An interview with David Polonsky, the artist behind the Oscar-nominated film and graphic novel Waltz with Bashir. A few simple descriptions would suffice to understand just how rich and strange an artwork…

Algeria was imploding into civil war in 1993 when Amara Lakhous, born in 1970 in Algiers, wrote his first novel. But no bombs go off in The Bedbugs and the Pirate, the inner monologue of a Gogolian forty-…

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…

Péter Esterházy is one of Hungary's foremost contemporary novelists, having won literary distinctions both at home and abroad. A number of his works, including Helping Verbs of the Heart,…

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.…

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…

(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…

Concern. I think that was what I craved. A warm and steady and unchangeable concern. In a time of blood and tears, in a Libya full of bruise-checkered and urine-stained men, urgent with want and longing…

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…

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…

This interview was originally published August 12, 1995, in NRC Handelsblad. A unique phenomenon in Dutch literature: Kader Abdolah, a political refugee from Iran who writes little gems of stories—in…

Toming Jun Liu interviewed MuXin in July 1993 in MuXin's home in a suburb of New York. The complete interview was published in Chinese in Lianhe bao (United Times, Taipei, January 23, 1994). Toming…