In this issue

The July 2018 issue of World Literature Today is bursting at the seams with lively summer reading. In a powerful essay from the cover feature, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck maps the blind spots of globalization, challenging Western complacencies. In another brilliant essay, Ladan Osman takes the measure of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video. Other highlights include an interview with Chris Abani, a portfolio of Kurdish poetry, and a sharply observed short story by Sylvie Weil. As always, the rest of the issue is packed with additional poetry, fiction, essays, book reviews, and reading recommendations from all over the world.

Negotiating Four Generations Of Voices

(with a Little Help from Google Earth)

3 mins

Yu Xiuhua - A Life Lived In Poetry

She is a subsistence farmer with a ninth-grade education and a disabled person with speech and writing challenges, yet she has been the most talked-about and best-selling poet in China. Her name is Yu Xiuhua, and her life is a triumph of poetry.

10 mins

The Cadillac

A bar mitzvah brings multiple generations of a family together in celebration, far from the reach of the evil eye.

10+ mins

Lin Shu, Author Of The Quixote

China is so peculiarly revealing in its essence that few authors can approach it without unveiling their innermost fantasies. He who speaks of China speaks of himself.– Simon Leys

4 mins

De Beauvoir And Sartre On The Kibbutz

While visiting a kibbutz to give a lecture, and after dining on both hot desert-root vegetable soup and sushi, the speaker becomes the listener when someone in the audience completes an anecdote about Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

9 mins

Slaying New Black Notions - Childish Gambino's 'This Is America'

Poet Ladan Osman considers how Childish Gambino obliterates rooted acts of black optimism and expression, leading us to understand the artist’s persona as a site upon which historical and aesthetic lineages are free to interact and contradict each other.

4 mins

The Enduring Impermanence Of Jenny Erpenbeck

For Jenny Erpenbeck, nothing lasts forever, not home, not the rituals that connect us to previous generations, not even death. Even her writing style celebrates this impermanence.

10+ mins

Vectors, Vanishing Points, And Vicissitudes In The Works Of Jenny Erpenbeck

Life for Jenny Erpenbeck’s characters is a vector, a movement through time and space, in which both temporal and spatial circumstances impinge on the individual’s trajectory.

10 mins

Read all stories from World Literature Today

World Literature Today Magazine Description:

Your passport to great reading. Each issue of World Literature Today delivers book reviews, fiction, poetry, interviews, and essays by the best new writers from across the globe. Now in its 90th year of continuous publication, World Literature Today has won dozens of awards including most recently the Apex Award for Excellence and Annual Gold Ink Award.