As usual, the boy missed the fly ball that anyone else would have caught with his eyes closed, and it rolled into a thicket of reeds by the river.

As first lines go, that of Leïla Marouane’s second novel and debut in English, The Abductor (2000, translated by Felicity McNab), is a masterpiece of concision and intrigue: “My father…

Aliide Truu, the warped murderess and tragic victim at the center of Sofi Oksansen’s astoundingly ambitious novel Purge, is an elderly woman when we meet her in the opening chapter. Living alone…

July hung over the village like a sheet of blue metal.

It was night. The ninth night. The most silent, the most oppressive.

Aren’t we simply the humble, anonymous handmaids-and-men of literature, the grateful, ever-obsequious servants of the publishing industry?

Alta Ifland’s writing raises important questions about the legitimacy and practice of autobiography that are too often taken for granted by American writers.

Octavio Paz once wrote that the modern poet “extracts his visions from within himself.”

God’s Bits of Wood, first published in 1960 and translated from the French by Francis Price, is not only one of the best novels to have come out of Africa but one of the best political novels of the 20th century.

The Communists disliked comics, but recognized they could be used as propaganda.

In Afghanistan—where, eight years after the toppling of the Taliban by US and allied troops, women are still routinely arrested and jailed for “running away” or for adultery, where current…

Chinese rock star Cui Jian begins his song “The 90s” with the line: “Words are not precise already—can’t express this world clearly.” And in the clarity of that expression,…

Yesterday on the New Yorker's Book Bench, Elizabeth Clark Wessel served up a condensed version of the Quarterly Conversation's “Translate this Book”, an incredible feature published…

NPR Acknowledges Foreign Fiction with Year-End List With the season of best-of lists upon us, it's refreshing to see NPR publish its first list of Best Foreign Fiction. Writer Jessa Crispin, founding…

We find the beginnings of Polish speculative fiction at the end of the eighteenth century, when clergymen were responsible for its birth.

Nabokov Screaming his Head Off The new online newspaper The Faster Times was linked by the New Yorker yesterday for their take on the new Nabokov publication, the unfinished novel The Origin of Laura.…

Why we Read Bolaño Horacio Castellanos Moya's, “Bolaño Inc.” for the November Guernica, is a further effort to debunk our romanticized construction of the decade's literary…

WWB in the New Yorker The November issue of Words Without Borders, with new translations from Germany, has just gone live and is met with praise today from the New Yorker's Book Bench blog with a…

Well, I don't know, but somehow those East German men don't interest me.

Manu Dibango is a jazz saxophonist with an international reputation. His song “Soul Makossa” is sometimes credited with being the first disco tune. Dibango was born in Cameroon in 1933. At…

Spain's Prince of Asturias Awards Cultural exchange continues in Europe among prestigious prize-givers, with Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré cinching the Prince of Asurias Award for literature.…

Upcoming Events: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Legacy America's Society Friday, October 23 7:00 pm Free admission As a follow-up to the Fall 2009 symposium marking the 400th anniversary of Inca…

“This is not a novel,” wrote Diderot repeatedly, in his Quixotic, polyphonic Jacques the Fatalist and his Master. You could say he was ripping off Sterne, who ripped off Rabelais in the grand…

Although André Brink is one of South Africa’s leading Afrikaans-language writers, and although his work has appeared in English, at least one article has questioned whether we can categorize…

Rows of skulls. Simple and incomprehensible.

Evil wears no gloves.

I made a habit of visiting the refugees in the train standing in the middle of nowhere, outside the village of Karabulak.

He was alone with a bottle of red wine, looking grim.

Pentecost, the peaceful holiday, had come, and Salzburg was something akin to a city under a state of emergency.

As images of the bloody crackdown by government militias and plainclothes policemen on the peaceful demonstrations were broadcast after the controversial results of the tenth presidential elections in…

María Constanza Guzmán: In the introduction to The Subversive Scribe, you mention the usefulness of “self-referential inquisitions by prose translators” as models for the study of translation…

Seven thirty in the morning. My autumn heart is still beating slowly.

It's been almost three years since I ended up on that street in the Grenelle quarter.

On the flight from Oslo to Tromsø, two worlds: the land far below me, the map on my lap.

There are those who think that Mundaca is the most beautiful town on the Biscayan coast.

Thus began the most noteworthy period of transformation in Rio de Janeiro.

One summer in Germany, the obscure and tenuous link between literature and seismic activity tightened and took on all the solidity of a secure and binding knot.

In my first post, I suggested that translators' efforts in the sphere of education might have a transformative effect on the understanding and appreciation of the work of translation. In my second,…

He was arrested at the age of seventeen, released five years later, and executed when he was twenty-four.

The pieces collected here represent the many uses of memory in shaping and completing narratives.

He himself was deeply convinced, and no one and nothing could dissuade him from his belief, that his library remained his ultimate fatherland.

He was selected to be part of the Sonderkommando when he arrived at Treblinka.

Writers, true stories, wrong numbers, and chance: Eduardo Lago spins an homage to the late Paul Auster.

My selections are a very small segment of the corpus of Pakistani literature.

I have no definite answer to questions about why I migrated from India to Pakistan after the partition in 1947.

The tiny leaves break into applause. What are these trees called? I ask the interpreter.

If you happen to be behind bars, you should keep talking . . .

In a previous post, I suggested that the covers of books make for rather poor soil in which to cultivate an appreciation for translated contemporary literature among the general English-reading public.…

What is translation? Translation is an English word. Translation is, moreover, a somewhat peculiar English word. Peculiar, I would suggest, because it eludes definition. It is impossible to define because…

I set out to showcase the robust variety of contemporary Japanese fiction, and I think these writers demonstrate just that, brilliantly.

The general membership meeting of the American Literary Translators Association's annual conference in October of this year went smoothly until the final item of business. The members present were…

The village rocked tranquilly upon the waves, up and down, creating a strange sensation.

Phillip Lopate’s essay was included in the accompanying booklet to WWB‘s March 5th event at the Idlewild bookstore in New York City. It is also part of our ongoing discussion of Etgar Keret’s…

Miriam Shlesinger’s essay was included in the accompanying booklet to WWB’s March 5th event at the Idlewild bookstore in New York City. It is also part of our month-long discussion of Etgar…

Silence I don't know when I began to write this book.

Silence I don't know when I started to write this book.

My entire body was stiff, I was freezing cold and shaking all over.

It has never been possible to speak of Greece in terms of a simple opposition between what it contains on the inside, and what lies beyond its borders.

This essay was originally featured in the brochure for Natasha Wimmer and Francisco Goldman's December 4, 2008 discussion of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, held at the Idlewild bookstore in New York City.

This essay was originally featured in the accompanying booklet to Francisco Goldman and Natasha Wimmer's December 4, 2008 discussion of Roberto Bolaño's 2666, held at the Idlewild bookstore in New York City.