Project MUSE®: World Literature Today - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in World Literature Today.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 83 (2009) through current issueLatest Articles: World Literature TodayTWOProject MUSE®World Literature Today1945-81340196-3570Latest articles in World Literature Today. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988914
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We bore the ardor of love in our chests.The Persian ironwood tree, harbinger of spring / Photo by alessandrozocc / Adobe StockIN THE CURRENT ISSUE OF WLT, “Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026,” translated by poupeh missaghi, presents a stark reminder of the stakes involved in bearing witness, whether through literature, journalism, art, or street protest (page 9). The author kept her diary during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Iran and published it on a diaspora website soon thereafter. Such eyewitness accounts remind us that civilians bear the brunt of every war, doubly so when repressive regimes crack down on every form of internal dissent.Out of fear for her safety, the diarist published her journal
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallEditor’s Note2026-04-23text/htmlen-USEditor’s Note2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®61832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Alligator Alcatraz
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988915
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Photo of Alligator Alcatraz by Felix Mizioznikov / Stock.adobe.comIn this braided essay, a writer in Florida recounts her trip to protest Alligator Alcatraz while reflecting on her Jewish family’s history of persecution by the Nazis.On Sundays, protesters hold an interfaith vigil across the street from Alligator Alcatraz. Located deep inside the Everglades, the detention center houses immigrants awaiting deportation. When our synagogue was invited, my husband and I didn’t hesitate to go.I come from a family of immigrants. My grandmother Eunice and her sister Rose left their home in Vilnius, Poland, in 1905. They settled in Brooklyn, married their husbands. Though my grandfather went to night school and learned
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallAlligator Alcatraz2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAlligator Alcatraz2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®159032026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Diary of a Massacre: Iran, 2026
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988916
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This anonymous diary was written during the January 2026 massacre of protesters in Tehran and published anonymously on a diaspora website right after connection was reestablished. Over the course of eight days, it narrates the unknowability of those days as the horror was beginning to unfold.The city is closed down. All the lights in our street are turned off. You can hear a buzzing sound from outside. Nothing can be seen through the window. I go to the rooftop. The lights in the other street are also off. Even the café in front of our house is closed. I cannot find the source of the sound. I go back inside, call some friends. R says they have been closing business around four p.m. every day. No one feels like
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallDiary of a Massacre: Iran, 20262026-04-23text/htmlen-USDiary of a Massacre: Iran, 20262026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®403172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Polna
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988917
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Photo from Warsaw Market, by Maryna Seradzenka / Unsplash.comPhoto of Jehanne Dubrow by Brad TaylorA writer recalls the market in Warsaw where her family shopped during shortages while living abroad, when shopping was a reminder that they were residents in a landscape where new histories were built on the crushed bricks of earlier ones.Even during the worst shortages in Warsaw, it was possible to find at Polna market a cabbage frilled like a bouquet of exuberant flowers, the orange-gold mushrooms called kurki, carrots, cucumbers. And beyond the fruits and vegetables, there were rarer things to buy if a customer had real money—złoty or, better yet, US dollars. Vendors sold blue tins the size of dinnerplates that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallPolna2026-04-23text/htmlen-USPolna2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®95252026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Reading in Egypt: Where Books Still Speak
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988918
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Reda Khalil Amin, The Cafe, oil on canvasReading in Egypt is not a fixed habit or a measurable trend. It is a living practice—shaped by history and rupture, by language and loss, by the places where books are found and the communities that keep them in circulation.Here, writer, editor, and translator Sherine Elbanhawy reflects on reading as resistance, tracing how books endure through feminist historiography, translation, and lived intimacy. Writer and translator Gretchen McCullough, drawing on decades of teaching, publishing, and translating in Cairo, maps the infrastructures that make reading possible—from bookstores and presses to translation programs and literary prizes. Lebanese writer and journalist Lana
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallReading in Egypt: Where Books Still Speak2026-04-23text/htmlen-USReading in Egypt: Where Books Still Speak2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®443522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Fermans
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988919
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Photo of by paladin1212 / Stock.adobe.comPhoto of by Marina / Stock.adobe.comPhoto of by Grave passenger /
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallFermans2026-04-23text/htmlen-USFermans2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®166412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Miracle (an excerpt)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988920
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I Know and I RememberAs a child, I adored fire; I was like a moth to every candle. My mother tried to keep me away from open flames, but my grandmother used to say, Lassa, ca iscramentat—let her be, so she learns.I scramentu is a Sardinian word for that kind of knowledge you gain through your own—or someone else’s—mistakes, so you don’t make the same mistake twice. Inside that single word, you can read, in filigree, a whole narrative arc: first there’s the experience of an unpleasant event, then its working-through, and finally it is entrusted permanently to memory as a protective reminder. Iscramentu is a word for survivors. And even though academic etymology traces it to Castilian Spanish, I prefer to go back to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallMiracle (an excerpt)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USMiracle (an excerpt)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®196842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-239 Books from the Philippines
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988921
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Philippine literature has never been more visible, at least in the North Atlantic. As the Philippine editor-at-large for a leading literary translation journal, I see it up close. Translations from our languages are turning up in anthologies out of New York and London. Anglophone magazines are running special issues devoted to Philippine writing (see WLT, March 2018). Filipinos are winning prizes and grants left and right.But I’m not here to repeat what’s been shared a hundred times online by cultural agencies and the local literati. What would be the fun in that? I’m here to champion my taste: the books that speak most to our shared origins and horizons. “Here, fire is everywhere, in recurring tableaux, in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmall9 Books from the Philippines2026-04-23text/htmlen-US9 Books from the Philippines2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®155632026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Childless Woman Visits Family Farm
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988922
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I go back to Cervenka Farm to confirm I am the same person who lived in New Jersey and bought cucumbers because I believed in myself.I go back to Cervenka Farm to see the zinnias. They are the same lollipop colors as the zinnias in Pennsylvania, with the same fat noses, but I can tell the difference.I go back to Cervenka Farm to confirm I am the same person who lived in New Jersey and bought cucumbers because I believed in myself. The gingham mama on YouTube said pickling is easier than it looks. I prepared to succeed. The Cervenkas gave me free dill and several high-fives. I awarded salty peridot medallions to friends and neighbors all summer.I go back to Cervenka Farm because the Cervenkas were there before I met
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallChildless Woman Visits Family Farm2026-04-23text/htmlen-USChildless Woman Visits Family Farm2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®50682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Fable of the Three Teams: (and Their 2026 World Cup Guests)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988923
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Before the first 2026 FIFA World Cup game on June 11, Chilean writer Carlos Labbé offers a retelling of the Aniyunwiya-Cherokee fable of Jackrabbit and Terrapin. If literature, like soccer, is the description of an encounter between one being and another, can we all be acceptable to one another?This is North America. Let’s try and agree on a word to open a conversation about competition and literature out of the rhetorics of war. Nowadays the whole world seems to agree on a single word to define lore, which is war—the subordination through pure and simple strength—backpedaling from the proven realization every single human discipline has had that there cannot be one single world, word, war, and that collaboration
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallFable of the Three Teams: (and Their 2026 World Cup Guests)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USFable of the Three Teams: (and Their 2026 World Cup Guests)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®236382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Father in the Rain
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988924
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Translation from the AlbanianPhoto by Alex Dukhanov /
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallFather in the Rain2026-04-23text/htmlen-USFather in the Rain2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®61292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Brazzaville
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988925
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Photo by andriano_cz / Stock.adobe.comShortly before my arrival in the Republic of the Congo, I received a note from a contact within the country: “Travel here is beyond yours, the locals’, and even the president’s control. Prepare for: General chaos and lack of Infrastructure in the interior; Changes to roads, rails, flight schedules; Delays, Cancellations, and Breakdowns of vehicles, services, electricity, and communications; The highest prices in the world for hotels, tourism, transport overland, and worst service culture.”In other words, I’d been duly warned and therefore couldn’t say much about spending my first three hours in Brazzaville detained by a bribe-hungry border official at the airport, and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallBrazzaville2026-04-23text/htmlen-USBrazzaville2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®89992026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Nineteenth Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988926
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Translation from the RussianMary Cassatt, In the Box (ca. 1879), 43 x 61 cm, oil on canvas, private collection / Wikimedia Photo by Maris
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Nineteenth Century2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Nineteenth Century2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®51602026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23“Red Flags at High Mast”: 6 Questions for Deb Olin Unferth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988927
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In Earth 7 (Graywolf, June 2026), all sea life is destroyed, there are no free bees, and the line between human and robot has thinned. Still, a class has a bully, a teenager argues with her mother, and a young woman falls in love—with an enhanced human often mistaken for a robot.Earth 7 pairs the bleak landscape of ecological devastation with a timeless girl-meets-girl romance. Whether to preserve the human race or not is up for debate. To the extent the germ of any story can be identified, can you tell us where this story originated?I began to think, Wow, the future is going to get really, really weird.Maybe the smallest cell of the story first divided in my mind when I heard about the idea to combat global
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmall“Red Flags at High Mast”: 6 Questions for Deb Olin Unferth2026-04-23text/htmlen-US“Red Flags at High Mast”: 6 Questions for Deb Olin Unferth2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®78692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23To See Beyond by Anna Badkhen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988928
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IN AMERICA’S Appalachian Mountains, a death ritual imported by colonists from the borderlands of Wales echoes today in folktales and shadowy memories: a hired Sin Eater would arrive to eat the bread placed upon the body of the dead, symbolically ingesting their unrepented sins and thus cleansing them of transgression. I thought of this tradition as I read Anna Badkhen’s beautifully rendered, often wrenching essays in To See Beyond.Badkhen has been bearing witness to the sins of the world for many years, early on as a war correspondent and later as a sojourner in places wounded by our worst transgressions. She doesn’t seek to absolve humanity of our crimes, however—instead, she renders for us the lives of people
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallTo See Beyond by Anna Badkhen (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USTo See Beyond by Anna Badkhen (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®87022026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23One Sun Only by Camille Bordas (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988929
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IN THE VEIN OF “news you can use,” I always enjoy when an author includes useful information in their stories. It adds a dimension of practical self-expansion to theoretical self-realization. I realized it was Camille Bordas herself who had put that thought in my head; that, if a bit of instruction—a recipe, a manual, a process—was included in a story, then “no matter what you thought of it, you hadn’t wasted your time reading it.” The line comes from the final and finest story of this collection of very fine stories, “Colorín Colorado,” which I’d read previously in the New Yorker, where many of these pieces first appeared.In that same story, a character seeking absolution for his boorish behavior utters the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallOne Sun Only by Camille Bordas (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USOne Sun Only by Camille Bordas (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®57342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Best Literary Translations 2026 ed. by Arthur Sze et al. (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988930
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THE NUMBER OF foreign literary works published in translation in the United States is small, and European works still dominate 45 percent of the market. But indie presses (Dalkey Archive, New Vessel, Seagull, Archipelago, and Deep Vellum) now offer extensive slates of world literature in translation or publish exclusively foreign literature in translation. One of their goals is to serve historically underrepresented cultures and languages that are emerging in our postcolonial world. Based in Dallas, Deep Vellum has published close to two hundred foreign titles since its creation in 2013. In 2023 a group of writers and translators, listed above as series co-editors, found a home with Deep Vellum for their “Best
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallBest Literary Translations 2026 ed. by Arthur Sze et al. (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USBest Literary Translations 2026 ed. by Arthur Sze et al. (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®71412026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988931
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THE SUMMER MY MOTHER Had Green Eyes takes us fourteen years into the past, when Aleksy spends a summer with his dying mother in rural France. The hate Aleksy has always felt toward his mother, due largely to neglect, dissipates and transforms into surprising tenderness. Tatiana Țîbuleac hands us a story about a relationship restored in its final hour, in which mother and son confront past grievances and trauma, while learning how to live.Țîbuleac’s book is actually a book within a book, a text written by Aleksy as a product of therapy. At the urging of his psychiatrist, years after his mother’s death, Aleksy pens his memories of that pivotal summer in the form of a book, everything that transpired, from the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®73532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Departure(s) by Julian Barnes (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988932
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SOME NOVELS MOVE FORWARD by accumulation; some advance by subtraction. Departure(s) belongs decisively to the latter group. It is a book that pares away urgency, spectacle, and even narrative expectation until what remains is a concentrated attention to how a life, any life, comes to rest with itself. Announced by its author as his final novel, Departure(s) is not shaped like a farewell, nor does it seek to crown a career. Instead, it examines the quieter, more difficult question of how one stops without falsifying what has been lived.The title’s parenthesis is not decorative but diagnostic. Departure is never singular here, nor ever final in the uncomplicated sense. There are departures from people, from places
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallDeparture(s) by Julian Barnes (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USDeparture(s) by Julian Barnes (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®68422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Bodies Found in Various Places / Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes: The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernández by Elvira Hernández (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988933
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“THE POETRY DOES NOT MATTER,” writes Elvira Hernández. “Se perdieron 20 años de nuestras vidas. Fue una lotería arreglada.” Or, as Daniel Borzutzky and Alec Schumacher translate in this new bilingual anthology of Hernández’s poetry: “La poesía no importa. 20 years of our lives were lost. It was a rigged lottery.” And yet, since being seized and tortured by the Chilean dictatorship in 1979, Hernández has never stopped writing. Her poetry has remained relentless—speaking with the melancholy, irony, prayer, and fury that have poured out of Chile for those twenty years of military rule, and long after.Writing against the dictatorship, María Teresa Adriasola began using the pseudonym Elvira Hernández in order to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallBodies Found in Various Places / Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes: The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernández by Elvira Hernández (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USBodies Found in Various Places / Cuerpos encontrados en varias partes: The Selected Poems of Elvira Hernández by Elvira Hernández (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®97222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Book of Wills ed. by Reem Ghanayem (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988934
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“I AM NUR AL-DIN ADNAN HAJJAJ, a twenty-seven-year-old Palestinian writer with many dreams. I am not a number, and I refuse to let the news of my death pass without notice.” Predicting that the war will end his life, Gaza writer Nur al-Din shouts from the window of the page. His last will pierces with hopefulness like embers devouring the indifference of paper. He is everyone on earth as he wants to be seen and remembered.Nur al-Din died in the war. He was from Shuja’iyya, the largest neighborhood in the east of Gaza. More than twelve centuries old, this historic neighborhood took its name from the name of a leader from the Middle Ages who fought against the crusaders. In Arabic, Shuja’iyya means courage.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallBook of Wills ed. by Reem Ghanayem (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USBook of Wills ed. by Reem Ghanayem (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®97292026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Seesaw Monster by Kotaro Isaka (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988935
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IT’S HARD TO REMEMBER a time before the “AI boom” dominated our news cycle and tech industry. But as distant as it may feel, artificial intelligence used to be a thrilling dystopian science fiction concept and not just another app on your phone.Like any good science fiction writer, Kotaro Isaka’s Seesaw Monster tells a story that has aged well—or maybe poorly—in the seven years since it’s been published. In part, it’s about a malevolent AI in the style of old science fiction tropes. But it isn’t antiquated or out of touch with current AI discourse, though it was originally published in 2019, before the AI boom had truly started to ignite. Just last year, the novel was translated into English by Sam Malissa, and it
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallSeesaw Monster by Kotaro Isaka (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USSeesaw Monster by Kotaro Isaka (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®54772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Odessa by Gabrielle Sher (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988936
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GABRIELLE SHER’S Odessa is a modern feminist parable of resilience, paying homage to when “remembering was a duty of being Jewish, a purpose that carried from generation to generation.” Set against the anti-Jewish nineteenth/early-twentieth-century pogroms in a then multi-ethnic port city in what is now Ukraine, Odessa is a firsthand reimagining of women’s narratives, incorporating a spiritual Jewish myth alongside horror and a monster tale, in a time where women “wished to forget they were Jewish, wanting to be nothing and no one,” and so a Golem is born in the shadow of their suffering.When Yetta’s father attempts to bring her back to life, he unwittingly severs Yetta into two beings; one Golem with no memory of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallOdessa by Gabrielle Sher (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USOdessa by Gabrielle Sher (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®59702026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Solitaria by Eliana Alves Cruz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988937
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JOURNALIST, POET, and fiction writer Eliana Alves Cruz is one of the most acclaimed female authors in Brazil today, alongside Conceição Evaristo, Ana Maria Gonçalves, and Djamila Ribeiro, having received the prestigious Jabuti Award for her collection of short stories A vestida (The woman dress) in 2022.Cruz’s literary career began with the publication of poetry and short fiction in the renowned journal Cadernos negros (Black notebooks), followed by her 2016 debut novel, Água de barrela (Bleach water). This and the two books that followed are historical novels that narrate the lives of enslaved Black Brazilians throughout the centuries, and examine issues such as social injustice, racism, and violence against
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallSolitaria by Eliana Alves Cruz (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USSolitaria by Eliana Alves Cruz (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®60342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The World after Rain: Anne’s Poem by Canisia Lubrin (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988938
<p></p>
SIX YEARS AFTER her Griffin Poetry Prize–winning poetry collection The Dyzgraphxst, Canisia Lubrin has graced the literary scene with another book-length poem. Structured into three parts, The World after Rain is suffused with grievances, adorations, invocations, and perplexities. Time in this book stands as a metaphor for the relationship between the dead and the living, between the poet and her mother, Anne.But in this poem, the relationship is beyond biological; it is creative and generative, as the poet beholds her mother as a muse, and through this muse, the poet is able to make sense of the world around her, interrogate history, and further complicate and extend traditions. Time is the room that reoccurs
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe World after Rain: Anne’s Poem by Canisia Lubrin (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe World after Rain: Anne’s Poem by Canisia Lubrin (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®52522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Aside from My Heart, All Is Well by Héctor Abad (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988939
<p></p>
THE TITLE OF THIS ELEGANT novel is both a literary allusion and a medical diagnosis. Héctor Abad’s protagonist is a Catholic priest and man of letters named Luis Córdoba Uribe. Luis, who has a serious heart condition, answers questions about his health by reciting “Sonnet with a Caveat.” The poem, by Colombian writer Eduardo Carranza, concludes, “The Sun, the Moon, all of life divine, / All, aside from my heart, is well and fine.”Modeled on Luis Alberto Álvarez, a priest and influential Medellín film critic until his death in 1996, Luis loves opera, food, and wine. His mighty appetites have contributed to his failing health, which can only be remedied by a heart transplant. Narrated by Luis’s longtime housemate
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallAside from My Heart, All Is Well by Héctor Abad (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAside from My Heart, All Is Well by Héctor Abad (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®54052026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Spent Bullets by Terao Tetsuya (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988940
<p></p>
WHAT IS THE POINT of life when everyone thinks you have already succeeded? Terao Tetsuya’s existential debut short-story collection, Spent Bullets, translated into English with care by Kevin Wang, demonstrates some of the consequences of striving, consequences that are deepened by the cultural dissonance that comes with immigration: disillusionment, desolation, and disconnection.It’s a heavily masculine text, contending with the struggle, from middle school to elite university to Silicon Valley, of three Taiwanese classmates-turned-friends: Jie-Heng, Ming-Heng, and Wu Yi-Hsiang. If these conditions are stifling for the three, they are even more stifling for the two female characters of note, who appear only
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallSpent Bullets by Terao Tetsuya (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USSpent Bullets by Terao Tetsuya (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®69882026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988941
<p></p>
THE CANADIAN WRITER Mark Anthony Jarman has written stories that have garnered high praise from the likes of A. S. Byatt, the New York Times, and Kirkus. His reputation as a pioneer and a visionary precedes him. His most famous and probably most celebrated story, “Burn Man on a Texas Porch,” is about a survivor of a propane explosion who emerges from the conflagration hideously reinvented and whose narrative voice consists of a virtuoso balancing act of insight, searing pain, and poetry. Reading it and other, earlier pieces like “Knife Party,” which is about a nightmarish blast in Naples among delinquents whose sheer energy seems to overrule their squalor, one senses that Jarman’s writing is handmade, like
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallSmash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USSmash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®76542026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece by Nasser Rabah (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988942
<p></p>
IN HER WORK OF POETICS Forces of Imagination, poet Barbara Guest wrote of “the Voice of the Poem,” not the voice of the poet. This distinction establishes the power of language and its propulsive and enriching energy to create new forms, over and against limited self-expression. Yes, a non-self-identical consciousness is present in the poem. But how can this consciousness remain open to the Voice of the Poem, coming as it does from Elsewhere?Nasser Rabah’s book Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece plunges into this dynamic, under the most threatened, indeed lethal, circumstances imaginable. Rabah, a Palestinian poet, lives in Gaza (see WLT, July 2025, 71). Translated by the team of poet Ammiel Alcalay, Tunisian artist
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallGaza: The Poem Said Its Piece by Nasser Rabah (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USGaza: The Poem Said Its Piece by Nasser Rabah (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®69402026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23A Splintering by Dur E Aziz Amna (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988943
<p></p>
IS THIS A FEMINIST bildungsroman? Or is it the familiar rags-to-riches narrative of South Asian anglophone fiction, only with a woman protagonist? A Splintering, Dur e Aziz Amna’s second novel, hovers productively between these possibilities. It is an intriguing intervention in a literary tradition that has long privileged male desire and male transgression.Tara, the novel’s protagonist, is one of five siblings raised in poverty in a small village in Punjab, Pakistan, called Mazinagar (literal translation: “where the past lives”). Intelligent, educated, and deeply dissatisfied, Tara escapes Mazinagar through marriage into a family that has migrated to the city yet remains tethered to its rural origins, insisting
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallA Splintering by Dur E Aziz Amna (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USA Splintering by Dur E Aziz Amna (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®58342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Unnameable by Anna Gual (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988944
<p></p>
IN UNNAMEABLE, Anna Gual uses Catalan, the long-suppressed and overshadowed language almost obliterated by Francoist erasures, to confront the limits of all language to capture being and beingness. While Gual is not in danger of being jailed for writing in Catalan, as were writers during the dictatorship, there is still a sense of danger and linguistic marginalization. Her work’s central preoccupation is how to show the gap between experience and the words we summon to name it. The collection’s title, borrowed from Samuel Beckett, signals this philosophical inheritance. Gual’s poems do not resolve the unnameable—they inhabit it. The poems in the collection are spare, imagistic at times, and powerfully rendered in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallUnnameable by Anna Gual (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USUnnameable by Anna Gual (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®46792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988945
<p></p>
LABELED AS THE SECOND installment of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s “Trilogy about the Boy,” The Sorrow of Angels would best be considered as the middle portion of a singular novel set in early twentieth-century Iceland over a period of months, published in three parts rather than an individual novel within a series.This creates some difficulty in reviewing the book in isolation, particularly when one hasn’t yet read the third and concluding portion of the work. Fortunately, discussion of the second part of the “Trilogy about the Boy” doesn’t spoil anything for the first book that its back cover doesn’t already reveal. Moreover, any consideration of the style and themes of The Sorrow of Angels would be equally relevant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®79342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time by Samina Najmi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988946
<p></p>
SAMINA NAJMI’S debut collection of personal essays traces the interconnectedness and hauntings of multigenerational migration in her family history. A South Asian American academic of Pakistani heritage, Najmi is a professor of multiethnic literatures at Fresno State University. Her essays unpack the precarity and fluidity of terms like “South Asian American” and “Pakistani” as she traces her circular and layered history as a migrant (see WLT, March 2017, 9).The book consists of forty-two essays assembled in three parts with thirteen poetic fragments interspersed. (Several of these essays have been published earlier in a variety of journals, magazines, and anthologies.) The collection begins with a triptych—three
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallSing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time by Samina Najmi (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USSing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time by Samina Najmi (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®66572026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– by Jamaica Kincaid (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988947
<p></p>
THE MEDITATIVE ESSAYS in this volume, previously published in a number of well-known magazines, form the intensely personal saga of an immigrant who succeeded in thoroughly reinventing herself and creating a distinctive sense of self in the context of a dramatically different world.Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua, in 1949 and was sent as a teenager by her mother to work as a nanny for a family in New York. But she soon realized that her true vocation was not domestic care but writing, so she changed her name and moved to New York City, where she became a freelance writer. As luck would have it, she also happened to meet William Shawn, then editor of the New Yorker, and she
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallPutting Myself Together: Writing 1974– by Jamaica Kincaid (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USPutting Myself Together: Writing 1974– by Jamaica Kincaid (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®59792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988948
<p></p>
IAN McEWAN’S What We Can Know is set in twenty-second-century England, after undersea nuclear detonations and climate catastrophe have flooded the planet and reduced human life to outposts on high ground, diets of protein bars, and—crucially—nostalgia for the twenty-first century. The novel is narrated primarily by Thomas Metcalfe, an obsessive scholar whose specialty is the literature of 1990–2030, a period he idealizes as a lost golden age, when “the sea stood off at a respectful distance.”Metcalfe becomes obsessed with a lost poem, “A Corona for Vivien.” Written by the talented and egotistical Francis Blundy and inscribed on vellum, it was allegedly read aloud at a 2014 dinner party in the English countryside
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallWhat We Can Know by Ian McEwan (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USWhat We Can Know by Ian McEwan (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®72352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Henua by Marin Ledun (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988949
<p></p>
HENUA is a detective novel by the French author Marin Ledun (b. 1975) set in the Marquesas Islands, which are part of French Polynesia, an autonomous overseas collectivity best known among tourists for such attractive tropical destinations as Tahiti or Bora Bora. While the genre is familiar, it is the unusual setting that makes this novel original and interesting. The narrative includes multiple cultural clashes, since the Tahitian and Marquesan languages are distinct, and the family background of the investigating gendarme is partly Metropolitan (or Hexagonal) French. The issue of a future referendum on independence for the vast group of Polynesian islands is also in the background of the plot.Colonized in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallHenua by Marin Ledun (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USHenua by Marin Ledun (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®51502026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Caste: A Global Story by Suraj Milind Yengde (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988950
<p></p>
THE CASTE SYSTEM in India has often been sanitized as an ancient and benign structure of occupational organization. In practice, however, it has functioned as an insidious system of social domination, producing entrenched political, economic, and spatial inequalities. Its most violent expression has been the exclusion of Dalits—historically positioned outside the caste system and forced into stigma-tized labor such as scavenging and disposing of dead cattle—through the regime of untouchability, a reality long documented in Indian literature.In Caste: A Global Story, Dr. Suraj Milind Yengde—prominent Dalit scholar and author of Caste Matters (2019)—challenges the persistent framing of caste as an exclusively Indian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallCaste: A Global Story by Suraj Milind Yengde (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USCaste: A Global Story by Suraj Milind Yengde (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®75092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988951
<p></p>
IN A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF, Megha Majumdar deploys several narrators to tell the story of the collapse of Kolkata during a climate crisis. Over the course of a week, the narrative arcs of the three main characters—Ma, Bomba, and Dadu—collide while a punishing, deadly heat envelops India.Shortlisted for the 2025 National Book Award, A Guardian and a Thief illustrates how individuals suffer from a problem that humans created and then failed to remedy: global climate change. Because of the horrors of a heat so hot that birds fall dead out of the sky, well-positioned Indian citizens can flee to the United States with a climate refugee visa—though, as the novel unfolds, a disgust for these refugees grows. To get such a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallA Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USA Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®51382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988952
<p></p>
LIADAN NÍ CHUINN’S debut story collection, Every One Still Here, is a riveting collage of individual and collective trauma, memory, and resilience. Set against the backdrop of Northern Ireland’s troubled history and inspired (among others) by the book Children of “The Troubles,” by Laurel Holliday, the stories weave together fictional narratives with historical and timely truths, creating a striking and thought-provoking book.In the opening story titled “We All Go,” narrator Jackie wonders:I’m very loud inside my own head. I think of people (innocent) dragged out of houses, apartments, red-brick terraces, driven away down these old lanes to internment camps. People here paying money in taxes for the Army which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallEvery One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USEvery One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®75222026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Anarcadia by Dominic Hand (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988953
<p></p>
ANARCADIA, which provides the title of Dominic Hand’s recent collection of poems, is a botanical genus of trees from the tropical regions of the Americas, most notably the cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale). Its etymology is a combination of Latin and Greek: ana, which suggests “upward” or “outward”; and cardium, which pertains to the heart. The flowering plant of the cashew tree takes its name from the fact that the nuts, the “heart” of the fruit, are shaped somewhat like a heart and grow, perhaps unbelievably, outside and upward from the fruit. The cashew tree is large and evergreen, reaching fourteen meters (forty-six feet) in height, with an irregularly shaped trunk. The kidney-shaped nut is surrounded by a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallAnarcadia by Dominic Hand (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USAnarcadia by Dominic Hand (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®81202026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Best American Essays 2025 ed. by Jia Tolentino (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988954
<p></p>
“It would be a curiously purblind reader who did not find the state of the nation as portrayed by these perceptive cultural rapporteurs to be a cause for lament, outrage, and concern.WRITING IN MARCH 2025, aware that her words “will not reach readers until October,” series editor Kim Dana Kupperman recognizes that her foreword to this edition of The Best American Essays will be “a missive from the past.” It’s hard to judge the kind of future in which what she says will be received. To some extent, of course, that’s always the case, given the lead-in time required for book publication. And we can never predict exactly how things are going to unfold. But this feels like a particularly volatile point in human
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Best American Essays 2025 ed. by Jia Tolentino (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Best American Essays 2025 ed. by Jia Tolentino (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®66512026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23When the Museum Is Closed by Emi Yagi (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988955
<p></p>
EMI YAGI’S second novel chronicles the impossible love story of two women united by a long-dead language and by fantastical circumstance. Surreal and contemplative and utterly hopeful, When the Museum Is Closed challenges the notion of unbridgeable distances, both between people and within oneself.Rika Horauchi leads a withdrawn life. She lives alone in her apartment and works in a freezer warehouse where she rarely speaks with anyone—and if she must, Rika often mimes that she is physically unable to speak at all. But her reclusive day-to-day gets wholly upset when her former Latin professor recommends her for an only-Mondays, after-hours job at a museum housing classical artifacts. Her job? To converse in Latin
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallWhen the Museum Is Closed by Emi Yagi (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USWhen the Museum Is Closed by Emi Yagi (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®49082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Flood by Yevhen Lyr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988956
<p></p>
WRITER, SOLDIER, TRANSLATOR, and volunteer Yevhen Lyr’s The Flood is a brave, vital contribution to the ever-growing realm of Ukrainian literature rooted in the war in Ukraine’s most recent years. Incorporating elements from the 2023 Kakhovka Dam disaster as well as his own volunteer experience of rescuing people during the disaster’s aftermath, The Flood is an unforgettable book that blurs the fine lines between nonfiction and fiction.The Flood is the story of The Clock-smith, an enigmatic figure who settles in Kherson and opens a small workshop. As The Clocksmith settles into and adjusts to life in Kherson, he meets dozens of people who share their own encounters with a disaster that forever reshaped one of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Flood by Yevhen Lyr (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Flood by Yevhen Lyr (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®70792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Country Doctor’s Tale by Mohamed Mansi Qandil (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988957
<p></p>
SET IN AN ISOLATED VILLAGE in conservative Upper Egypt soon after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, Mansi Qandil’s novel is unlikely to win plaudits from the Egyptian Tourism Authority. It depicts a world dominated by an almost inescapable poverty that necessitates daily toil in the fields; by diseases including bilharzia, endemic in part because of the blithe indifference to risk of those liable to infection; and by an apparently ineradicable submission among the villagers to authority in the form of the local mayor and a brutal police, the latter of which cynically fixes an election. But perhaps more repressive than all these is a traditional sexual morality, mercilessly enforced by the threat of violent
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Country Doctor’s Tale by Mohamed Mansi Qandil (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Country Doctor’s Tale by Mohamed Mansi Qandil (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®40682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Slightest Green by Sahar Mustafah (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988958
<p></p>
“It would be a curiously purblind reader who did not find the state of the nation as portrayed by these perceptive cultural rapporteurs to be a cause for lament, outrage, and concern.IT IS HARD TO OVERSTATE the plight of the Palestinian people, especially in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks, which unleashed the full force of Israel’s military might against Gaza, while settler violence against, and displacement of, Palestinians in the West Bank is at a record high. The UN has declared famine in Gaza and has classified unfolding events as a genocide.But even these horrifying and evocative words fail to convey the reality of life on the ground. Which is where novelists like Sahar Mustafah, a Palestinian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Slightest Green by Sahar Mustafah (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Slightest Green by Sahar Mustafah (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®70062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23The Ripped Bodice, Brooklyn
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988959
<p></p>
Located in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, right down the street from Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum, is The Ripped Bodice, an independent bookstore dedicated to the celebration of romance novels. From classics like Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, to unique paranormal romance books, Ripped Bodice has hundreds of romance books for any type of reader.I found myself on the most anxiety-ridden train ride of my life as I made the hour-long subway commute from Manhattan to Brooklyn to visit The Ripped Bodice on my last full day in New York City. Out of everything there is to do in New York City, visiting the store was the thing I most wanted to do. And out of the hundreds of romance books I wanted to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallThe Ripped Bodice, Brooklyn2026-04-23text/htmlen-USThe Ripped Bodice, Brooklyn2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®42812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Remember us
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989028
<p></p>
Translation from the Persian
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallRemember us2026-04-23text/htmlen-USRemember us2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®41752026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23Muntu by Eugen Bacon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989029
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EUGEN BACON’S Muntu is an exploration of divergence and convergence, of myth and lived experience, of the visible and the unseen. Through words conjured from a prodigious imagination, Bacon (b. 1971, Tanzania) crafts a novella that initially feels unmoored, only to reveal how every strand belongs to a larger, intricate weave. The reading experience mirrors life itself: uncertain, filled with arrivals and departures, until meaning emerges, even if still partially mysterious.At the center of its motley constellation of characters is Izett, arguably the fulcrum of the narrative, considering a role she later assumes. Her time in a convent, her strained passage through foster homes, and the scars these experiences
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989029">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/842/image/coversmallMuntu by Eugen Bacon (review)2026-04-23text/htmlen-USMuntu by Eugen Bacon (review)2026-04-232026TWOProject MUSE®42832026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-23