Evolution/Revolution

Festival participants write in on this year's World Voices theme.

Anthropoids
by Mary Ann Hoberman

The next time you go to the zoo . . . [More]

An Essay
by Daniel Menaker

In the last five years, it has appeared very likely that literature and storytelling as we have known them for thousands of years will be affected radically, even if only gradually, by the findings of neuroscience. [More]

Poems
by Fuad Rifka

He opens the windows of his head
God recedes into the distance . . . [More]

Abenteuer eines jungen Affen
by Uwe Kolbe

Wie oft in meinem Leben war auch diesmal die Initiative nicht von mir ausgegangen. [More]

Golden Calves
by Mark Kurlansky

Every year at the time of the Passover holiday this question starts itching me. What about the Golden Calf? [More]

Standing in the Midst of Change
by Hwang Sok-Yong

These days I call myself a young writer. [More]

The Year We Drowned
by Susan Bernofsky

  Grandmother is a young woman, hardly older than me, and is walking in the woods somewhere in Mitteleuropa: looking for mushrooms, perhaps . . .  [More]

How Does the World Change?
by Nawal El Saadawi

Who is changing the world? And to whose interest? Those super powers who own God, absolute truths, nuclear weapons, money, and media? [More]

Little Hungary
by Péter Nádas, Eszter Babarczy, Zsófia Bán, László Garaczi, and János Térey

Little Jack lived in Little Hungary in a little Hungarian tenement house. [More]

After "The Fact"
by Raja Shehadeh

There were serious controversies about the project. Some thought the shameful past is better forgotten than commemorated. [More]

Night Zoo
by Zsófia Bán
translated by Paul Olchvary

My heart began racing the moment I reached the entrance. We hadn’t seen each other for a week, and after so long your absence was almost unbearable. [More]

The Story of the Second Slap in the Face and the Tides of the World
by Paul Verhaeghen

I come home, my lips still stained with black chocolate icing . . . [More]

A Poem
by Dany Laferrière

Les humains aiment les dates . . . [More]

Dead on arrival
by Armin Petras
translated by Cordula Brucker

Twenty years already, not bad. The wall is open, Germany reunified. [More]