Posted on January 13, 2022
Which experiences have a greater influence on us—our successes, or the times when we've been hurt? Frank Báez's bravura poem "Self-Portrait" makes an excellent case for the latter. It is an alternately humorous and horrifying catalog of a lifetime of mishaps, injuries, victimizations, and miscommunications, punctuated with a few moments that invoke the possibility of joy:
Posted on December 29, 2021
A man, a woman, a street, a chance meeting . . . A reader might consider all of this a setup for romance, but Évelyne Trouillot's short story "Detour" delivers something quite different.
Posted on December 15, 2021
In the party mood, or not so much? Here are six selections from WWB Campus that provide unexpected—and sometimes even clashing!—perspectives on celebrations around the world.
Posted on December 08, 2021
We all know the story of Cinderella . . . or do we? In Ena Lucia Portela's mischievous update of the famous folktale (translated into English by Pamela Carmell), the heroine is as virtuous, beautiful, and downtrodden as one might expect. But Cleis (as Cinderella is called here) also dreams of becoming a soap-opera villainess and knees a would-be assailant—the story's sole "prince"—in the crotch.
Posted on November 22, 2021
"Sometimes I think it's impossible for someone to be as beautiful and ugly as my mother," comments the fourteen-year-old co-narrator of Manon Steffan Ros's award-winning Llyfr Glas Nebo (The Blue Book of Nebo). The Welsh novel, recently published in English translation and excerpted in Words Without Borders a few years back, is in the form of dual diary entries from a boy and his mother following a world-ending war.