Literature

The fictional characters in most campus novels are almost always undergraduates between the tender ages of eighteen and twenty-two. (Think of novels such as The Secret History, The Idiot, On Beauty, The Marriage Plot, A Separate Peace, The Incendiaries, Normal People, etc.) These revelatory stories, underscored by a character’s long-awaited independence mixed with terrible homesickness,

The Real Impact of Imaginary Friends Yiyun Li Share article Such Common Life by Yiyun Li 1. Protein “I thought all children had imaginary friends,” Dr. Ditmus said. Ida, upon being queried a moment earlier, had admitted that she had not had one when young. “Do you mean all American children?” Ida asked. Her Chinese

World Literature Today, the University of Oklahoma’s award-winning magazine of international literature and culture, will host a book signing with Native writers Chelsea T. Hicks (Osage) and Oscar Hokeah (Cherokee/Kiowa) at Norman’s Green Feather Books on Friday, October 13 from 6-8pm. The event—co-sponsored by OU’s Center for the Americas, Department of English, and World Literature

Sure, graphic novels and memoirs are the latest literary rage, but have you heard about graphic poetry? Many contemporary women poets are reimagining the relationship between text and image, offering new ways of representing women’s bodies, and cutting and erasing found texts like they’re slicing up the patriarchy itself. And in many ways, they are.

I seldom promote binaries, but I think it’s safe to say that there are two types of stories at work in 2023’s astounding selection of debut short story collections: those set in far-away realities, and those grounded in our immediate world.  Travel to the Appalachians, Soweto, Port Harcourt, Bangalore and listen closely to the local

“What might this be?” had been a question that, in the course of my thirty-five-year career as a clinical psychologist, I’d posed to clients hundreds of times. It was, in fact, the customary prompt used when administering the “Rorschach,” which is a type of personality measure that calls for asking a patient to look at

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,