World Literature Today

The literary magazine I chose to review for class is World Literature Today (or WLT for short) and can be found at your local ODY library. True to its title this magazine publishes, reviews, and conducts interviews with contemporary writers from around the world. Within the magazine you can find a variety of content relating to poetry and fiction writing. WLT is published by the University of Oklahoma and is based in Norman Oklahoma. It has its own website, but unfortunately does not make any of its content available online. It is published in an aesthetically pleasing manor in color with many pictures. On a shelf it would fit in just fine with News Week It is easy to flip through and you find yourself reading a work then continuing on to reading the interview with the author to figure out more of its meaning. I think this is a great feature, being able to get a sense of who is actually writing this work and what they want to say about it; nice benefit only found in contemporary writing.
I would recommend this magazine to someone who wants to get a wide variety of content. There is no joining topic of the works it is more of a survey of writing from around the world ranging in subjects. The only unifying theme is that the work is done internationally. One section of the latest issue (November to December) is titled “New Baltic Poetry” to give you an idea of what it is like. It also has a selection of new poems by the greatest Chinese poet of our time (in its opinion), Bei Dao with an interview following. I took some time with Dao’s work and found a poem entitled “Clear Sky” to be my favorite. It has a very metaphysical feel to it, like the other works shown by Dao. It is somewhat short only being 16 lines in length and has concise sentences using simple words (perhaps more so then intended due to translation). While the true meaning really escapes me, the poem succeeds with me in instilling a set of beautiful images and spins my mind off into tangents of thought.
Finally on the other side of things there is a fictional short story by Etgar Keret, an Israeli writer entitled “The Pricking”. These works are written in the writers native tongue and translated into English for publish in the magazine, as I think is the standard procedure. With the contemporary nature and global pool of writers this magazine is a great place to find a new author to follow.