Does Colonialism Ever End?
What does it mean to describe colonialism as past when its borders, hierarchies, violence, and silences continue to shape the present—and even imagined futures? Bringing together Karim Kattan’s Eden at Dawn, and Mahmud El Sayed’s The Republic of Memory, the authors examine literature’s power to expose the enduring structures of domination dating back to the […]
Strangers in a Strange Land
There are many ways to be made to feel like an outsider. In Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong a transplant to the big city of Bombay learns to find her footing — and sense of self — navigating the train lines that criss-cross the city and country. While in A. Igoni Barrett’s satirical Whyteface, a Nigerian man […]
Who? New! International
Each season, BKBF presents several international debut authors whom we want to shine the light on for our audience. This year we present Palestinian writer Sara Abou Ghazal (Dream of Ayn Ara), Teme-Augama Anishnabai professor Tyson Stewart (The Return of the Nish), Kurdish writer Agri Ismaïl (Hyper), and Azerbaijani poet Egana Djabbarova (My Dreadful Body […]
On Vastness and Being: Latin American Authors in Conversation / De la inmensidad de ser: Autores latinoamericanos en conversación
On Vastness and Being: Latin American Authors in Conversation From Chile, Daniela Catrileo’s short story collection Piñen (trans. Jacob Edelstein) illuminates the lives of young Mapuche people, navigating the joys and tragedies of the urban Indigenous experience in South America. In Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun (trans. by Sarah Booker), set in […]
What We Inherit, What We Retell
How and why do the stories we inherit become part of the narratives we tell about ourselves? Drawing on myth, song, literature, and cultural memory, internationally acclaimed authors Sinan Antoon, Violaine Huisman, and Valeria Luiselli discuss intertextuality as a way of thinking through memory, exile, family, history, and identity in their respective novels, Of Loss […]
Literature, Resistance, Survival
Three writers explore art, resistance, and survival under oppressive regimes. Jeremy Tiang (State of Emergency) follows the political upheavals of Singapore and Malaysia from the 1940s to the present through the intertwined lives of one family; Emmelie Prophète (Cécé) captures the stark realities of a young woman navigating gang-controlled neighborhoods and violence in contemporary Haiti; […]
Disruptive Love
International authors Yang Shuang-zi (Taiwan Travelogue, translated by Lin King), Claire Adam (Love Forms), and Justin Haynes (Ibis) discuss writing love in its most complex manifestations. From the disrupted intimacies between a young traveler and her interpreter in Japanese-controlled Taiwan, to the fractured maternal love of a young woman forced to give up her baby […]
The Silence in Stories
Three acclaimed international authors explore the effect of silence and untold stories on their characters. In The Ghetto Within, Santiago H. Amigorena portrays a Polish emigre in Argentina haunted by the fate of his mother in the Warsaw Ghetto; Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Sisters reveals guarded family stories that bond and fracture relationships of […]
The State of US
The state of America has been in flux throughout its political landscape and beyond. In their newest books, authors Jason Mott, Kevin Nguyen, and Gary Shteyngart tackle everyday discussions plaguing our communities– from gun violence, anti-Asian violence, and the everyday microaggressions and racism that blended families encounter. In People Like Us, two black writers are […]
The Surreal Next Door
In Marie-Helene Bertino, Ananda Lima, and Debbie Urbanski’s most recent collections, the everyday becomes infused with a haunting, surreal quality. In Exit Zero: Stories, death takes many forms, ranging from menopausal vampires, ghost girls, a painting of Cher, and a day-old peach. In Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, a writer sleeps with the […]
Setting Community Tables
New York is a city defined and shaped by its restaurants, which serve as spaces for community just as much as they do for cuisine. Chef Scarr Pimentel (The Scarr’s Pizza Cookbook), Irene Yoo (Soju Party), and Rawia Bishara (Tanoreen: Palestinian Home Cooking In Diaspora) have all built restaurants imbued with the identity, spirit, and […]
Myth, Folklore, and Everyday Horror
Authors Amanda Lee Koe (Sister Snake), Zuzana Říhová (Playing Wolf, translated by Alex Zucker), and Olive Senior (Paradise Once) share the ways Chinese, Czech, and Jamaican myth and folklore have influenced their work. From the binding and transformative ties of sisterhood in Tang dynasty China and present-day Singapore, to the creeping psychological horrors afoot in […]
Loneliness and Exile
In this virtual panel, three novelists explore dislocation, belonging, and the search for connection. Sulaiman Addonia (The Seers) chronicles the early weeks of a young Eritrean refugee in London, following the intimate and erotic lives of asylum seekers. Sarah Moss (Ripeness) reveals family secrets woven into an English woman’s migration between 1960s Italy and modern […]
Mapping History and Its Fault Lines
How do you make sense of the hidden rifts and fractures in a country’s past? How do you read the warning signs? The Cartographer of Absences, by Mozambican writer Mia Couto (translated by David Brookshaw), unearths long-buried secrets of colonial-era atrocities. Geetanjali Shree’s Our City that Year (translated by Daisy Rockwell), explores the underground tensions—and […]
The Pulp and Quick of Life: Vigdis Hjorth and Eva Baltasar in Conversation
Writers of potent, electrifying, and candid novels – Vigdis Hjorth (If Only, trans. from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) and Eva Baltasar (Mammoth, trans from Catalan by Julia Sanches) – come together to discuss passion and disenchantment. If Only tells the story of a young woman who begins a tumultuous affair, a cascading fantasy that eventually […]
Writing Personal and Collective Histories
Writers Hisham Matar (My Friends), Rania Mamoun (Something Evergreen Called Life, trans Yasmine Seale), and Omar Khalifah (Sand-Catcher, trans Barbara Romaine) come together to discuss the duty of the writer during periods of global crisis, in a conversation moderated by writer and translator Yasmine Seale. What do writers owe their collective communities, as contemporary artists […]
Surviving Coexistence
Genre-abundant writers, poets, and academics Bhanu Kapil (Incubation: A Space for Monsters) and Billy-Ray Belcourt (Coexistence: Stories) convene for an intimate and multifaceted conversation on the ways their work approaches survival – in the face of imperialism, settler-colonialism, misogyny, and more – and the ways they embrace hybridity and invert monstrosity in favor of fluidity, […]
Violent New Lands
In Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter, an opium-smoking Irishman and his mail-order bride are on the run in 1890s Montana. In Ye Chun’s Straw Dogs of the Universe, 10-year-old Sixiang journeys across an unfamiliar American landscape in the hopes of finding her long-lost father, who works on the railroads in California. In Like the […]
Once Upon A Disappearance
Join Jennifer Croft, Laura van den Berg, and Jáchym Topol in a discussion about disappearances through different lenses—individual, environmental, and psychological. In The Extinction of Irena Rey, eight translators gather at a sprawling house in the ancient woods of Poland, prepared to translate beloved author Irena Rey’s latest work—unprepared to reckon with her sudden disappearance […]
Hallowed Ground: Claiming a Literary Inheritance
In Where We Stand: Speech, Place, Justice (trans Padma Viswanathan), Djamila Ribeiro issues a rallying cry for Black Brazilian feminists to stake their own ground, inspired in many ways by figures such as Sojourner Truth, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Meanwhile, new works by Edwidge Danticat (We’re Alone) and Dionne Brand (Salvage: Readings from the […]
Writing Resistance
From Mumbai to Tenochtitlan—the ancient capital of the Aztec empire—and a fictional city called Nevers; disparate landscapes come to life in the voices of their inhabitants. In their latest books, authors Devika Rege (Quarterlife), Álvaro Enrigue (You Dreamed of Empires, trans Natasha Wimmer), and Dorothy Tse (Owlish, trans Natascha Bruce) track the collision of worlds […]
Violent Inheritances
Authors Ibtisam Azem (The Book of Disappearance, trans Sinan Antoon), Clyo Mendoza (Fury, trans Christina MacSweeney), and Jean-Baptiste Del Amo (The Son of Man, trans Frank Wynne) examine the consequences of intimate and global violence in their work. Focusing their attention on the turbulent landscapes of contested land, occupied cities, and fractured family relationships, these […]
Madness and Society
What forces—both internal and external—cause a mind to dangerously fray and unravel? For the groundbreaking scientists in Chilean author Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West), knowledge comes at a high cost. In Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio (translated by Adam Morris), meanwhile, social constraints and family secrets […]
Sexuality and Self
Sexuality, in its various forms—as a source of self-assertion and defiance, mystery and wonder, power and control—is a crucial feature of modern identity. From the refugee camps of Eritrean-Ethiopian author Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue to the magical landscapes of British-Jamaican author Leone Ross’s Popisho and the gritty French milieux of Virginie Despentes’ […]
The Thin Line Between Horror and Reality
Contemporary Latin American authors frequently explore the tension between horror and humanity, unearthing personal and historical trauma while examining the dark side of our interconnected world. From those intimately affected by violence in Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez‘s Songs for the Flames (translated by Anne McLean), to the sociopolitical horror of Argentine Mariana Enríquez‘s The Dangers […]
History, Violence, Fantasy, Fate: Ariel Dorfman and Mariana Enriquez in Conversation
In this virtual conversation, widely acclaimed Latin American writers Ariel Dorfman and Mariana Enriquez convene to discuss their literary obsessions and most recent publications. Ariel Dorfman’s newest book, The Suicide Museum, pushes readers to reconsider their understanding of the novel as a genre, as it moves deftly from an engrossing investigation of the death of […]
Baby Dearest
Four novelists grapple with motherhood and the complex web of emotions – revulsion, rebellion, reconciliation, and redemption – it engenders. Susie Boyt (Loved and Missed), Kate Briggs (The Long Form), and Guadalupe Nettel (Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey) discuss the fall out and growth of their characters as they embrace or reject social expectations and […]
Distant Fathers, Distant Stars
Remote and enigmatic father figures exert powerful gravitational pulls in the new novels by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård (The Wolves of Eternity, translated by Martin Aitken) and Zimbabwean Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (Digging Stars). What mysteries are contained in the lives of these men—and how do the stars and solar system provide a key to […]
World in Verse: An Evening of International Poetry (Virtual)
Join Words Without Borders for a virtual multilingual reading and celebration of international poetry in translation, in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Featuring Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, Kristine Ong Muslim, Iryna Shuvalova, Uilleam Blacker, Xavier Valcárcel, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, and more, introduced by Arthur Sze (winner of the 2019 National Book Award for […]