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World Literature Today devotes the cover feature of its summer issue to Notes from the Cataclysm, reckonings with the global Covid-19 pandemic by six writers from Cuba, Greece, Kurdistan, and the US. Other highlights in the issue include Shokoofeh Azar’s marquee essay on the Iranian diaspora down under; Q&As; with Michelle de Kretser, Bonnie Huie, and Zisis Ainalis; poetry from Greece, Hong Kong, and Portugal; and fiction from Brazil, Germany, and Kuwait. Reviews of new books by Andrés Neuman, Carolyn Forché, J. M. Coetzee, and dozens of other writers—along with a summer booklist—make the issue timely and indispensable.

Quarantine Innovations

DURING A CRISIS, books provide solace and hope, offering comfort in the literary world.

2 mins

Assembly

The students noticed an opening at the bottom of the fence, a tear in the wires. On the other side of the fence was the outside, which they only saw from the bus window when they were on their way to or from school.

3 mins

Desegregating Language - The New Afrikaans Crime Novel

Encountering postapartheid Afrikaans fiction for the first time, particularly the fast-paced crime novels of Deon Meyer, the author finds that the most unexpected element is the new lack of segregation between Afrikaans and English.

7 mins

Broken Novels, Ruptured Worlds

A Conversation with Michelle de Kretser

10+ mins

Why Iranians Continue to Seek Refuge in Australia

Shokoofeh Azar moved to Australia as a political refugee in 2010. Her novel The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (see WLT, Spring 2020, 96), originally written in Farsi, was shortlisted for Australia’s 2018 Stella Prize for Fiction and the 2020 International Booker Prize. Here she recalls her refugee journey from Iran to Christmas Island and reveals why Iranians continue migrating to Australia, despite the absence of war.

10+ mins

There Is Also This Civil War Inside of Me

A Conversation with Zisis Ainalis

9 mins

Keeping My Mother Alive

In Greece, a son who has returned to his mother’s home to care for her during the Covid-19 crisis contemplates what the global pandemic can reveal about our character.

10+ mins

Not Pregnant

In this work of creative nonfiction from Cuba, plague is something common shared with those who lived in Thebes.

5 mins

Hands

The mortar landed close, maybe two hundred meters away.

3 mins

Mapping My Mother

In isolation, a writer connects her mother’s attempt to protect her from “never-being-able-to-leave-Cuba-itis” to her own desire to protect her children amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

5 mins

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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.