Literature

The Elegant Balance of a True Friendship Hyperboles Two mathematicians but they are more friends than colleagues. The older of the two, Henry, teaches to graduate students in Tokyo while Liam, fifteen years his junior, works as a consultant for a private contractor in Madison. Liam makes fun of Henry because his name pentadecimally has

In Alissa Hattman’s debut novel Sift, the world, at first, appears hostile to life, nearly uninhabitable. Skies darken with toxins and smoke. Food, especially produce, is scarce. Drinking water is limited, a result of rivers and other natural bodies that have been poisoned. Fires rage and a tenor of violence hums at the edges of

University of Oklahoma students Sophie Miller, Alexis Davis, Lucy Law (tie), and Evan Johnson (tie) have been awarded first, second, and third place, respectively, in the 2023 Neustadt Lit Fest poster design project. The students participated in the competition as part of an annual collaboration sponsored by World Literature Today and the University of Oklahoma

In her column Untranslatable, Veronica Esposito considers why various words are so difficult to translate. Here, she looks at the famously difficult Tshilubà word ilunga and wonders what you think is the most difficult word to translate. Just what does “the most untranslatable word in the world” really mean? In 2004 a BBC article raised

When I started reporting The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia, back in 2016, I had a strong hunch that by chronicling the back of house at a fine dining restaurant, I might be able to observe, in microcosm, the broader social, political and cultural dynamics in Mexico today. A restaurant, as

An Archivist for the End of the World Christine Lai Share article An excerpt from Landscapes by Christine Lai September 1 I picture myself standing in the midst of a ruin. All around me there are mildewed canvases, rolled up crudely or crammed into drawers. The edges of the papers, mouse-eaten or worm-eaten, fall into

For thousands of years, women have been on the fringes of history and mythology. From “The Serpent Queen” Catherine De Medici, evil stepmother Kaikeyi in the Ramayana, and the seductive, church-destroying Anne Boleyn, the few women who have a place in our histories and mythologies are weak, bad, or evil. Recently though, many have started

Aurora Mattia’s debut novel The Fifth Wound is a fantastical journey through the formulation of one trans woman’s truth. Mattia’s own recapitulation as protagonist Aurora aka @silicone_angel bridges the gap between ancient Greece, Covid-era Brooklyn, and the rolling fields of Iowa searching to see herself and her beloveds clearly. Through a combination of memoir, mythology,

In an era of environmental catastrophe, it’s easy to forget that we are the environment too. The world affected by climate change is not some distant place far away in the forest. It’s us. We are as much a part of the world as the trees, the birds, the ocean. If we have any hope

After his wife dies in a sudden car crash, Jimmy Laird numbs his pain for a year. He stays up all night, drinking and doing coke and paying for some kind of company with women. He’s not healing, but he is coping. He tries to stifle his grief, which is so much easier than actually

Jane Wong’s memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City is a feast of a book. It’s about hunger—the hungers of the body, of addiction, of history. Brilliant, gutting, and funny, she writes with such range about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Atlantic City as their reach for the American Dream slips away. Wong

What even is time? I had a couple conversations this past year, some of them surrounding the publication of my non-chronologically structured novel We Do What We Do in the Dark, during which the concept of “queer time” came up, this idea that LGBTQ people experience time differently, almost four-dimensionally like Vonnegut aliens. We constantly

Children from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe in Towaoc, Colorado, study the Ute language using new e-learning platform Nuuwayga created by The Language Conservancy / Photo courtesy of TLC On August 9, 2023, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, WLT editor in chief Daniel Simon spoke with Wilhelm K. Meya, chairman and CEO

Adrienne Brodeur’s novel Little Monsters follows the Gardner family over the course of a summer on Cape Cod, the windswept peninsula—alternately wild and painstakingly tamed—where they have lived their entire lives. Abby Gardner is a painter on the verge of an exciting career opportunity. The tensions with her brother Ken, an aspiring politician who obsessively

I Am a Star in a Galaxy of Grandmothers Study of a supernova at the beach The tulle of my grandmother’s dress like a comet tail, a bouquet of algae tonguing my feet. I track the red sequins of her eyes in the surf. Anything left is mine to love: a spray of sand, ropes

Dr. Cornel West / Courtesy of AAE Speakers Cornel West, who recently retired from Princeton University as the Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies, visited the University of Oklahoma late last week. He was on campus to take part in OU’s Presidential Speaker Series in a point/counterpoint discussion, “Saving

Women get lonely. Men do, too, but there’s something ineffably unique about female loneliness, which is more vulnerable and open to danger than the male version. Female bodies walk through the world as moving targets, rather than as weapons. Perhaps this is why writing on the loneliness of women has a particular haunted quality to

In a cold, cruel city indifferent to your fate, an acquaintance from your hometown can be a lifeline, as can the three guys you happen to bunk with. You feast on donkey burgers and rooftop views of the city. You watch your friends forced out of the city, then befriend others to take their place.