Women were confined to reading prayer books and religious hymns. And they wrote in the margins. Centuries went by. Those marginalia are, in fact, the books I need to read.

Robert Louis Stevenson says that to tour lighthouses is “to visit past centuries.”

It was not my plan to start writing a diary, let alone keep doing it for seventy-seven days.

“The world will remain untouchable and unknowable, whether you’re in its corona or not.”

Right from the start, Cabo Verdean concepts of identity and individuality were defined by this mixed reality: the African and the European, in all their diverse and contrasting characteristics.

It was only very gradually that we came to understand that the Europeans, out of malice or simple ignorance, had instilled in us our reluctance to accept our condition as Africans.

In those days the island of Boa Vista was the whole world.

She stared at me in horror before hurrying off as fast as she could.

While Arabic publishing has historically focused on literature for adults and young children, recent years have seen an increasing number of titles aimed at a young adult readership.

From March 5–8, 2020, over 170 rare book dealers from 18 countries gathered at the Park Avenue Armory for the 60th Annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair. In the weeks since the fair,…

David Tomas Martinez to JudgeWinning Poems to Be Published on Poem-a-Day and WWB We’re pleased to announce the 2020 WWB Poems in Translation Contest spotlighting groundbreaking work by poets…

“They say that even the smallest particles, like the virus, atoms, etc., make a sound . . .

I often feel that adults forget what children’s stories are capable of.

One cannot write about real-life experiences from the place of the “I” without laying claim to a place in the world.

What I'm trying to say is that we didn't have a sense of how dangerous it all was.

“That’s what we get for supporting Communism: standing in line for this black loaf.”

I was a woman: young, alone, divorced, left without a guardian or virtue, meaning that in society’s eyes I was an easy target.

How could they, when these women themselves had been through so much pain?

I’m living in a sci-fi movie. In fact, you are too. It’s a strange movie and the popcorn tastes of hand sanitizer.

I was determined; one day I’d marry a book.

A dispiriting narrowness has defined canons of Urdu feminist writing from previous decades.

So this is what the new year of those who worship this life looks like!

Her sagacity immortalized even her scattered, sporadic axioms.

If the collapse of the nation-state reinvented the Lebanese novel, its reconstitution could galvanize literature.

The stories are abundant with social wisdom, moral instruction, and cultural knowledge.

These artists capture both words and images to convey narratives individual and collective.

Victor Meadowcroft reports from the 2019 international book fair in Guadalajara, where he attended panel discussions and launches, browsed the booths of innumerable international publishers, and interviewed…

Our dignified survival as a species probably depends on finding ways to listen to each other.

When we ask whether international literature can make us better travelers, who are the supposed beneficiaries?

Travel is a self-improvement project that has been sold to us as a world-improvement project.

There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.

New York, New York, January 16, 2020—The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced yesterday awards totaling more than $27 million in its first funding round of fiscal year 2020, including an…

A note from the editors on the occasion of our Rojava poetry feature.

These poems display the health and vitality of a literature that has already proved to be a potent medium for self-expression, a grounds for linguistic experimentation, and an important declaration of autonomy itself.

Some of the writers here document their own trips, while others invent characters and send them on the road.

The pieces here map the translation of event into prose—the creation of true crime writing.

It all began about the time that the men and women were finishing their first drinks.

Twenty years ago, one Christmas Eve, my best friend killed his sister and threw himself off a cliff.

“Must you put on a fur when someone shouts ‘murder'?

It's not a crime to kill someone on the high seas, you know.

In my Italian translation course at Georgetown University, advanced students of Italian learn about translation theory and practice (English-Italian, and vice versa) of different genres, including newspaper…

The results of these confrontations range from triumphant to catastrophic as the boundaries between worlds dissolve.

The works we have selected challenge a monolithic view of the fragmented histories and interconnected, overlapping cultures in the Philippines.

Not enough is known about the Philippines.

Despite their specificity, these tales transcend the places that produced them and throb with a universal appeal.

Humor has that paradoxical quality of being absolutely universal while also being deeply embedded in linguistic wordplay and sociocultural zeitgeist.

I shall tell you about one of the nitwits.

We are pleased to announce that Edith Grossman will receive the 2019 Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.“In a career that spans over half a century—translating, teaching…

Norway is a dream that many people carry.

We received 717 poems from 282 poets from 87 countries translated from 55 languages.

In the Antarctic in particular, the blue whale nearly died out.

I soon learned that Norwegians deliver praise in the past tense.

This year, we partnered with the Academy of American Poets for our first ever poetry in translation contest. We received 717 poems from 282 poets from 87 countries translated…

This year, among the dozen longlisters for Italy’s most important literary award, the Premio Strega, seven were women. The presence of titles written by women on the Strega longlist has never…

The Tang Dynasty poets translated by the Beat Generation poets are often associated with the totality of Chinese poetry.

In a world reimagining its cultural and political axes, Welsh-language literature gives voice to an experience more necessary and valuable now than ever.

I am old enough to remember when creative writing was something you “couldn’t teach” and was considered by the academy to be a less than legitimate area of study. (Journalism didn’t…

What brings people together isn’t language. If anything, when times are hard, shared language can deepen divisions.

All the pieces are told in the first person, lending intimacy and immediacy to the events they describe.

Now, thanks to our authors, we’re ready to step forth into the sun.