World Literature

‘I like to show some restraint when it comes to making things up...’ The Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas discusses the role of risk in writing, the ‘crisis of the novel’, and five books that have shaped his own work. (You can also read this interview in the original Spanish.)

Journalists are no longer able to properly investigate organised crime in modern Italy — leaving it to crime fiction writers to pick up the slack, says the acclaimed Italian novelist, Massimo Carlotto. Here he chooses five noir novels that explore the reality of Italian corruption in highly original ways.

National borders are fertile territory for fiction, says literature professor Claudia Sadowski-Smith. She recommends five novels about migration and border crossings.

The award-winning literary translator Edith Grossman discusses books on and of translation that inspired her, and considers the trade-off that every translator faces, between fidelity and meaning

More than 100 years after the Armenian genocide, author Tom de Waal chooses books that sidestep the politics and bring us back to the human story. He picks the best memoirs of the Armenian genocide.

Writers in China are afraid to criticise the state and society, says London-based author Ma Jian. From the 3rd century BC to 2008, these five exceptional works show how it’s done.

The acclaimed author recommends the most exciting new writing out of India and South Asia, including accounts of 9/11 from a Pakistani perspective and an emigré's return to an unfamiliar Bangladesh.

In 2011, two years before his death, Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Oscar Hijuelos told us about books that evoke the land of his parents, from a noirish take on contemporary Havana to the cabaret scene of pre-Castro Cuba

The South African novelist gives us an unvarnished view of the writer’s life, and explains how literature told the story of apartheid and why comedy is the easiest way to talk about race

From magical realism to political upheaval, John King, Professor Emeritus at Warwick University, recommends five essential works of Latin American fiction – and reveals what Jorge Luis Borges was like in person.