Literature

There is a long history of Ghanaians leaving home to settle elsewhere, often in other countries on the continent, and sometimes, further away. And while some leave with no intention of coming back, for many Ghanaians, the country remains home, even after they’ve acquired new citizenship. But in Nightbloom, my new novel, we meet Akorfa

Tania James’s novel Loot is a deeply affecting, deliciously imaginative spin on how 18th century Mysorean Ruler, Tipu Sultan’s infamous automaton—”Tipu’s Tiger”—came into being. James, in her typical out-of-the-box imagination, has given voice and life to the (historically unknown) makers of the life-sized mechanical tiger, fully equipped with sound and movement, mauling a British soldier,

In Oliver Sacks’ New Yorker essay “Altered States,” he describes an auditory hallucination he experienced after taking a handful of Artane pills, a very simple hallucination in which he heard his friends enter his home and sit in his living room while he was in the kitchen making eggs. “We had had a friendly, ordinary

Hamdi Abu Golayyel (b. 1967) was a gifted storyteller who fused Egyptian oral storytelling, myth, and folklore to tell the tales of marginalized and working-class communities in Egypt. He died on June 11, 2023. He was only fifty-six. I did not know him personally but reviewed the translation of his recent novel, The Men Who

Even the Smartest Phone Can’t Find Water in a Desert Find Water Near Me Fred. Fred. Your body temperature is 103 degrees Fahrenheit. Your heart rate is 125. I don’t understand, Fred. Is this what you’re looking for? QUENCH: A WATER BAR FOR FUN PEOPLE AND FINE DRINKING. 46-511 COTTON CREEK DRIVE. PERMANENTLY CLOSED. Okay.

Reading the stories in Amber Caron’s riveting debut collection Call Up the Waters, feels a little bit like walking around your apartment looking at things through binoculars—destabilizing, the sensation of reaching for things that aren’t quite where you expect them to be.  Her characters are adrift, uncertain, often prickly as they try to get their

My family immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union as political refugees when I was two years old. We left the only home my parents had known—the country where my great-grandfather was murdered as an enemy of the state, where my father had to join the army to “earn” one of the few

There’s something strange about being from a place that no longer exists. The Soviet Union lasted nearly 70 years; it transformed regional as well as global politics, redrew myriad national borders, killed millions of its own people, seeded widespread cultural chaos and then…Poof! In 1991, it dissolved. People who lived in the Soviet Union suddenly

The Young Man—forthcoming from Seven Stories in September 2023—is Annie Ernaux’s first novel in English translation after receiving the most coveted honor in literature, the Nobel Prize in Literature, in October 2022 (see WLT’s review of Le Jeune Homme, May 2023, 73). A slim book of autofiction, translated by Alison Strayer, it is a few

Telepathy Is the Sixth Stage of Grief Jane Pek Share article Exercises in Thinking by Jane Pek I I chose my psychic for her name. Faith, or Hope—that would have been too much. But: Grace. Maybe she even heard me when I thought, Yes. I found her, like everything else, on the internet. All you

John West’s Lessons and Carols is a lyric memoir of recovery, parenting, loss, and hope, which is also periodically quite funny (ex. the first line of the first Lesson, “Caring for this baby has taught me new ways to resent.”) Hopscotching through time, the memoir shows us West’s first, early forays with alcohol as a

Even data migrates now. Data migration and regular migration—all searching for a new home, hoping to remain useful but also hidden. Who brings you, reader, back home? Who do you leave home for a better life each day? Crossers left behind deserts and jungles— no sweat, even though you sweat a lot in the desert,

Aisha Abdel Gawad’s debut, Between Two Moons, is a striking novel about being an immigrant and Muslim in post-9/11 America, about battling the blasé of youth with the burdens of womanhood.  It’s June. Muslims in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn are ready to welcome with fervor the holy month of Ramadan. Twins, Amira and Lina, are only

There’s something inherently magical about reading in the summer. Perhaps it dates back to those formative elementary school days of furiously cataloging summer reads for the chance at winning a free personal pizza, but the words “summer” and “reading” bring only positive associations to mind. With only a few weeks of summer left, indie booksellers

Searching for truth, whether at personal level or on a larger scale, has been the subject of many different narratives. I started writing my novel South in 2018 when I was thinking about truth, its relationship to history, and the possibility of accessing reality amid the excess of misinformation and the erasure of historical facts. 

Teaching My Son to Swim While I Drown Megan Kamalei Kakimoto Share article Madwomen by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto My son, Toby, demands many stories, but it’s the story of the Madwoman he likes best. Because he is part Hawaiian and often forgets, I have made her the Madwoman in the Sea—some foolish attempt to right

Jenn Shapland has thin skin, literally. Thin Skin uses her medical diagnosis as a prism to examine the thinning of boundaries between our bodies and the world: “to be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” Mesmerizing and carefully, dutifully written, these

For me, the term “mad scientist” brings to mind images of bubbling beakers filled with neon liquids; elongated, menacing silhouettes; and of course (Pinky and) the Brain. There is a long history of stories from Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau all the way to Rick and Morty where brilliance tips over into madness