Written in the cursive-like Nastaliq script, and in an adaptation of Perso-Arabic alphabet, Urdu has become caught in religious silos. It “looks” Islamic, and therefore, in popular imagination, belongs to just one community in the multilingual universe. Anthologies of Urdu literature—in Urdu and in translation, especially in English—seem to have perpetuated this simplistic narrative of…
If one ever forgets what poetry is for, this newly-released collection is a reminder of its ability to renew, sooth and provoke. Mirror is a translation of a lengthy posthumous selection of Chinese poet Zhang Zao’s lifelong opus.
From a general historical perspective, the current confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan is not difficult to explain. By the end of the 19th century, Qing Dynasty was teetering on the brink of collapse. Territories were carved out and handed over to foreign colonizers after failed battles. Taiwan was ceded to the Empire of Japan…
“There are only two limitless things in this world: the human soul and its sins.” This grim declaration captures the essence of Sultan Raev’s Castigation, a dense and allegorical novel that draws as much from biblical prophecy as it does from the tragedies of Shakespeare and the myths of antiquity.
There is no obvious throughline that runs through this new collection of Osamu Dazai stories; only a series of Dostoevskian protagonists—young men who smoke too many cigarettes, cower in social situations, and who are consumed by deep insecurity. Written in the second half of the 1930s, Retrograde has been arranged and translated by Leo Elizabeth…
What happens if you took one of the classic characters of Chinese literary fiction and dropped him into early 20th-century China? That’s the premise of Wu Jianren’s novel, New Story of the Stone, written in 1905, which takes Jia Baoyu, from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber, and takes him first to Qing China…
Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was an Egyptian novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter. He spent his entire life in Cairo, the setting for almost all his fiction. He is best known for The Cairo Trilogy— Palace Walk (1956), Palace of Desire (1957) and Sugar Street (1957)—which follows succeeding generations of a Cairene family, the Abd al-Jawads, from…
Some myths take longer to die than others. For students of equine history, the passion that these animals inspire in their owners and breeders often act as a veil, impenetrable for scientists and historians trying to get to the facts. In Horses, Ludovic Orlando, who has been gathering the facts jaw bone by jaw bone…
This new collection with an unbeatably eye-catching title opens with the eponymous novella. “Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers” takes more than a few (albeit short) chapters to get to the heart of the story: the red-light district in Kashi (also referred to as Varanasi or Banaras in the novella) is slated to be shut down to…
At a demolition site in modern-day Osaka, workers unearth an old air raid shelter, sealed for decades. Inside, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr, The Tragedy of the Funatomi by Yu Aoi, and other classic mystery novels are wrapped in a faded cloth, embroidered with “House…
A compilation of reviews in the past twelve months for Women in Translation month (August 2025), including non-fiction and poetry and well as novels, short stories and children’s books. These include translations from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Sumerian, Bengali, Kannada, Hindi, German, Vietnamese, Thai and Kurmanji.
The opening panels of the manga Miss Ruki show the title character working from home processing medical insurance claims. In a voice so dry it verges on sardonic, an unseen narrator explains that Miss Ruki finishes projects weeks earlier than her boss thinks she does, so she spends most of her time reading books from…
A family has gathered in a mansion to discuss the inheritance of a wealthy grandfather’s estate. It is a familiar mystery setup, and one that risks cliché, but Yasuhiko Nishizawa takes it into exciting new territory in The Man Who Died Seven Times. Nearly the whole story occurs within a single repeating day, much like…
In Mistress Koharu, a Hungarian love doll comes to life, turning heads as she stalks the streets of Tokyo, while the man who bought her—Akira—strings along two other relationships in a spectacular feat of multitasking greed that benefits no one, least of all him. Written in Japanese by Noboru Tsujihara and translated by Kalau Almony,…
Anyone who has enjoyed learning a second language knows how productive the exchange between a first and second language can be. Yoko Tawada has published fiction and nonfiction in Japanese and German and demonstrates this principle more than most, having moved to Germany as an adult in 1982. She positions herself not as an immigrant…