Table of Contents, Masthead, and Editor's Note

Abstract

Fiction 16 Made Flesh by Alit Karp 34 We Were the New Era (an excerpt) by Andreas Baum Crime & Mystery 21 Who Can Identify Byomkesh? by J. Madison Davis Creative Nonfiction 30 Two Flash Nonfictions by Fabio Morábito The Puterbaugh Essay 40 Verse Africa by Matthew Shenoda WorldLiteratureToday Contents In Every Issue | 03 Editor’s Note | 05 Notebook | 37 Editor's Pick | 64 World Literature in Review | 96 Outpost SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2017 5 40 Q&A 10 A Conversation with Kike by Paul Holzman 24 A Conversation with Simon Armitage by Rob Roensch & Quinn Carpenter Weedon Poetry 15 Two Poems by Sasenarine Persaud 32 Four Poems by Maxim Amelin cover feature 47 Lives Interrupted featuring Leonora Flis Kike Marianna Pogosyan Gianni Skaragas Eli Eliahu Laleh Khadivi Sholeh Wolpé and Persis Karim about the cover Life jackets and a boat that were used by refugees and migrants to cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey lie abandoned on a beach on the Greek island of Lesbos on October 8, 2015. 15 cover image : aris messinis / getty What’s on worldlit.org Web Exclusive Visit our website for exclusive content including original audio recordings, photo galleries, blog posts, and more. Rositta Joseph Valiyamattam on India’s Aravind Adiga Online Extras Look for these icons throughout the issue for information about exclusive content found online. web exclusive photo gallery audio video Brian Sneeden on Kosovo’s Orllan Festival Shastri Akella on the aesthetics of migratory art Web Exclusive Web Exclusive Join the WLT community Join us on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, GoodReads, and Flickr to share ideas, view photos, and read book reviews. Facebook facebook.com/ worldlittoday Twitter @worldlittoday Pinterest @worldlit GoodReads goodreads.com/ worldlittoday On the WLT Blog Come into the Pictures: James Joyce, Illustrated by Peter O’Brien In all its linguistic, meandering richness, Finnegans Wake is commodious enough to accommodate a multitude of such confrontations, perhaps a limitless number of them.” A Poem for Nadia Murad on World Trafficking Day by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee It takes infidel bones To walk through a wreckage of idols.” Read more at worldlit.org/blog Join the conversation Join our community of readers and writers on Twitter. Use the hashtag #IReadWLT and tell us about your favorite features from this issue. Redcap Goblin @kayfey Lemme give a shoutout 2 one of my fav #magazines 4 giving me “New #Native#Writing”!!! #NativeAmerican #prose #poetry #essay Copper Canyon Press @CopperCanyonPrs Love this multi-genre performance with @sbitsui on @worldlittoday’s video playlist of 25 native authors! Justin Fortney @jfo The cover photo (by Zoe Marieh Urness) for the new issue of @worldlittoday is brilliant. Find us on flickr flickr.com/wltonline “ “ WORLDLIT.ORG 3 Have a comment, critique, or inspiration you’d like to share? Write to us on Facebook, tweet us @worldlittoday, or email the editor in chief at dsimon@ou.edu. editor’s note photo : alba simon  The haunting photograph on the cover of this issue, by award-winning Greek photographer Aris Messinis, poignantly evokes the “Lives Interrupted ” theme that begins on page 47. Messinis captured this moment on the Greek island of Lesbos on October 8, 2015. An estimated one million migrants and refugees entered the EU that year, fleeing the devastation of war zones, political unrest, and economic misery. The empty boat and abandoned life jackets provide a visual backdrop to the short story “The History of Grains,” by Greek writer Gianni Skaragas, which evokes the waves of humanity breaking on Europe’s doorstep (page 56). The islanders in Skaragas’s story put themselves “in God’s place, trying to save what is most worth saving,” but the capsized boats they find in the water are empty, with no sign of survivors. When the narrator’s father, an Orthodox priest, dreams of being pulled from the water by an unknown hand, he hears a voice, no more than a whisper, say, “This is your new land now.” For the waves of migrants making similar journeys in 2017, Skaragas wonders, who will tell their story? Who will “bear the listening”? Yet the story of the European refugee crisis is only part of the overall migration narrative. Refugees International estimates that currently 65 million people worldwide have been displaced...