21 Books for the 21st Century: The Longlist, by The Editors of WLT

Lit Lists Earlier this spring, the editors of WLT invited twenty-one writers to nominate one book, published since the year 2000, that has had a major influence on their own work, along with a brief statement explaining their choice. Now it’s your turn to vote for your favorites during our two-week contest (April 1–15)! Participating voters will be included in a drawing to receive a copy of the 1st-place book, and the top 5 list will be published in the summer issue. Ready to vote? Click here. Meena Alexander Atmospheric Embroidery: Poems Triquarterly, 2018 The spine of Atmospheric Embroidery is Indian Ocean Blues, which traces the poet’s sea voyage from India to Sudan as a child and probes my own diasporic obsessions with loss and longing, along with a return to what we sometimes “cannot bear to remember.” Uneasy dwelling places, her poems, like mine, spring from rupture and craving. This was her final book, but narratives of exile and themes of dislocation, identity, memory, and belonging also preoccupied Alexander throughout her life, as did the language and shape of self-invention and provisional spaces. She, like me, finds herself in many places all at once, marked—and yet oddly sustained—by fractured and shifting multiplicities. – Nominated by Shahilla Shariff Aharon Appelfeld Days of Astonishing Brightness (in Hebrew) Kinneret Zmora–Bitan Dvir, 2014 I read Aharon Appelfeld’s Yamim Shel Behirut Madhima (Days of... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2021-03-31 20:04:23 UTC ]

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