Windows on the World

by Matteo Pericoli

  As afternoon progresses and I look up from my work to gaze out this window, I may be invaded by springtime, or if it’s summer, by the perfume of jasmine or the scent of orange blossom, mingled with the aroma of leather and book paper, which brought Borges such pleasure.

  The window has one more surprise. From it, I can see the garden of the house where Borges once lived, and where he wrote one of his best-known short stories, “The Circular Ruins.” Here, I can move back and forth between two worlds. Sometimes, following Borges, I wonder which one is real: the world I see from the window, bathed in afternoon splendor or sunset’s soft glow, with the house that once belonged to Borges in the distance, or the world of the Library of Babel, with its shelves full of books once touched by his hands?

  (Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen.)

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  2010

  Contributors

  LEILA ABOULELA grew up in Sudan and moved to Scotland in her mid-twenties. She is the author of Lyrics Alley, Minaret, and The Translator.

  CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE was born in Nigeria. She is the author of Purple Hibiscus, Half of A Yellow Sun, The Thing Around Your Neck, and Americanah, which won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award and the Heartland Prize.

  ALAA AL ASWANY was born in 1957. A dentist by profession, Al Aswany is the author of the bestselling novel The Yacoubian Building, Chicago, and a novella and short story collection, Friendly Fire. He lives in Cairo.

  CHRISTINE ANGOT is a French novelist, short story writer, and playwright.

  ROTIMI BABATUNDE is the author of Bombay’s Republic, for which he was awarded the 2012 Caine Prize for African Writing. He lives in Ibadan, Nigeria.

  T.C. BOYLE is the author of twenty-five books of fiction, including, most recently, volume II of his Collected Stories (2013), and the novel, San Miguel (2012). He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

  GERALDINE BROOKS has authored four novels and two works of nonfiction. Her 2006 novel, March, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Born and raised in Sydney, she was a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans before turning to fiction. She lives on Martha’s Vineyard.

  XI CHUAN (pen name of Liu Jun) is a Chinese poet, essayist, and translator. Born in 1963 in Jiangsu province, he graduated from Beijing University in 1985. He is currently professor of Chinese literature at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. Xi Chuan has published six collections of poems, including Personal Preferences and A Dream’s Worth, two books of essays, two books of criticism, and numerous translations. His book of poems in English, Notes on the Mosquito (tr. Lucas Klein), was published by New Directions in 2012.

  TEJU COLE was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of Every Day is for the Thief and Open City, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and the Ondaatje Prize of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Brooklyn.

  EDWIDGE DANTICAT was born in Haiti in 1969, and was raised by her aunt under the dictatorial Duvalier regime (her parents left for the U.S. when she was four). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and many anthologies. She is the author of several books of nonfiction, most notably Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf, 2007), which was nominated for a National Book Award. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2009. Her most recent novel, Claire of the Sea Light, was published by Knopf in 2013.

  RANA DASGUPTA was born in the U.K., and studied at the universities of Oxford and Wisconsin. He is the author of the highly praised linked short story collection, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (U.K.) and the Hutch Crossword Book Award (India), and the novel Solo, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2010 for Best Book. He lives in Delhi, India.

  NASTYA DENISOVA was born in St. Petersburg in 1984. She is the author of two books of poems, There is Nothing (2006), and On (2010).

  LIDIJA DIMKOVSKA was born in Skopje, Macedonia, in 1971. She is a poet, novelist and translator, winner of the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature. She lives in Slovenia.

  CERIDWEN DOVEY grew up in Australia and South Africa. She is the author of the novel Blood Kin and a collection of short stories, Only the Animals. She was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” and named by the Wall Street Journal as “an artist to watch.” She lives in Sydney, Australia.

  MARINA ENDICOTT was born in Golden, British Columbia, and worked as an actor and director in Canada and the U.K. before she began to write fiction. She was a finalist for the 2008 Giller Prize, the 2011 Governor General’s Award, and won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, Canada/Caribbean region. She lives in Alberta, Canada.

  NURUDDIN FARAH was born in 1945 in Baidoa, in what is now Somalia, and grew up in Kallafo, under Ethiopian rule in the Ogaden. He is at work on a new trilogy, the overall title of which is The Collapse. The first book, Links, was published by Riverhead in 2004, and the second, Knots, was published by Riverhead in 2007. The final title in the trilogy, Crossbones, was published by Riverhead in 2011 and was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award 2012. His next novel, Hiding in Plain Sight, was published by Riverhead in 2014.

  RICHARD FLANAGAN is the author of five previous novels—Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, and Wanting—which have received numerous honors and have been published in twenty-six countries. He lives in Tasmania.

  DANIEL GALERA is a Brazilian writer and translator. His latest novel, Blood-Drenched Beard, is forthcoming in January 2015 from Penguin Press.

  FRANCISCO GOLDMAN is the author, most recently, of Say Her Name, winner of the 2011 Prix Femina Étranger, and of The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle.

  NADINE GORDIMER was a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was very active in anti-apartheid causes (several of her works were banned by the South African government) and the themes of moral and racial issues are reflected prominently in her work. Aside from the Nobel Prize, she received the 1974 Booker Prize and France’s Legion of Honour among many other awards, and was named an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of Britain’s Royal Society of Literature, a patron of the Congress of South African Writers, and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

  JOUMANA HADDAD is an award-winning Lebanese writer and journalist, and a prominent women’s rights activist. She was selected as one of the world’s 100 most powerful Arab women in March 2014 for her cultural and social activism. Her most recent publications are “I Killed Scheherazade, confessions of an angry Arab woman,” and “Superman is an Arab,” both available on Amazon.

  SHEILA HETI is the author of six books, including the novel, How Should a Person Be?, which was included on many Best of the Year lists, including in the New York Times and Salon. Her work has been published in The London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, n+1, Harper’s, and The Believer. She lives in Toronto.

  ANDREA HIRATA is an Indonesian author. His first novel, The Rainbow Troops, is the winner of New York Book Festival 2013 in the general fiction category and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

  MICHELLE HUNEVEN is the author of four novels, most recently Blame and Off Course. She lives in Altadena, California, and teaches creative writing at UCLA.

  DANIEL KEHLMANN was born in Munich in 1975 and lives in Berlin and New York. His works have won the Candide Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Welt Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize.

  ETGAR KERET’s forthcoming book The Seven Good Years will be published by
Riverhead in 2015.

  HARRIS KHALIQUE is a poet, essayist and columnist based in Islamabad, Pakistan. His major works in Urdu and English poetry include Ishq Ki Taqveem Mein (2006), Between You and Your Love (2012), and the award-winning collection Melay Mein (2012).

  KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD was born in Norway in 1968. My Struggle has won countless international literary awards and has been translated into over fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.

  MARÍA KODAMA was born in Buenos Aires and began studying and translating Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic with Jorge Luis Borges at the age of sixteen. She has lectured widely throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and is the founder and president of the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges and the Museo Borges. She has been named an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government and a winner of the Premio Jorge Luis Borges by the Argentinean government.

  LAURI KUBUITSILE is an award-wining writer living in Botswana. She is the author of numerous books for both children and adults, and has twice won Africa’s premier prize for children’s writing, The Golden Baobab, and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2011.

  EMMA LARKIN is the pseudonym for an American journalist who was born and raised in Asia, studied the Burmese language at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and covers Asia widely in her journalism from her base in Bangkok. She has been visiting Burma for close to ten years.

  ELMORE LEONARD wrote forty-five novels and nearly as many western and crime short stories across his long and successful career, many of which have been made into popular films and TV shows, including Out of Sight, Get Shorty, Jacky Brown, 3:10 to Yuma and the FX hit series, Raylan. He received the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, PEN USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. He was known to many as the Dickens of Detroit and lived there from 1934 until his death in 2013.

  ANDREA LEVY is the author of the multi-award winning novel Small Island and the Booker shortlisted The Love Song. She lives and works in London.

  TATIANA SALEM LEVY is a Brazilian author, born in 1979. Her first novel, The House in Smyrna, will be published in the U.K. in 2015 by Scribe.

  LULJETA LLESHANAKU is the author of three collections of poems published in English, and several others in Albanian and other languages.

  ANDRI SNÆR MAGNASON was born in 1973. His work has been published or performed in more than thirty languages. Andri has received the Philip K. Dick Award for LoveStar, the UKLA Award for The Story of the Blue Planet and all the categories of the Icelandic Literary Award. He lives in Reykjavík with his wife and four children.

  MIKE McCORMACK comes from the west of Ireland and is the author of two novels, Crowe’s Requiem and Notes from a Coma, and two collections of short stories, Getting it in the Head and most recently Forensic Songs. His work has been translated into several languages.

  JON McGREGOR is the author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, So Many Ways to Begin, Even the Dogs, and This Isn’t the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You. He has won the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was the runner-up for the 2010 and 2011 BBC National Short Story Awards.

  G. MEND-OOYO is a Mongolian poet, writer and calligrapher. He was born into a herder’s family in Dariganga, Mongolia. Mend-Ooyo lives in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and directs the Mongolian Academy of Culture and Poetry.

  RYU MURAKAMI is the enfant terrible of contemporary Japanese Literature, and the author of dozens of books, including the prize-winning In the Miso Soup, Almost Transparent Blue, and Audition.

  ORHAN PAMUK is the author of eight novels, a memoir, and three works of nonfiction. His work has been translated into over fifty languages. In 2006, he was the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and in 2012 he inaugurated the Museum of Innocence, in Istanbul, where he was born and continues to live.

  TIM PARKS is the author of fifteen novels, including Europa, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; four acclaimed memoirs of life in contemporary Italy; and other nonfiction works. He runs a postgraduate degree program in translation at IULM University in Milan and has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli and others.

  RODRIGO REY ROSA was born in Guatemala in 1958 and has lived in New York City and Tangier. He has translated several books by Paul Bowles into Spanish, and authored many novels and story collections, including El cuchillo del mendigo (The Beggar’s Knife), Cárcel de árboles (The Pelicari Project), El cojo bueno (The Good Cripple), La orilla africana (The African Shore), Severina, and most recently, Los sordos (The Deaf).

  TAIYE SELASI was born in London and raised in Massachusetts. She holds a B.A. in American studies from Yale and an M.Phil. in international relations from Oxford. “The Sex Lives of African Girls” (Granta, 2011), Selasi’s fiction debut, appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012 and her debut novel, Ghana Must Go, was published in 2013.

  JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the Southern editor of the Paris Review. His most recent book, Pulphead, was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

  LYSLEY TENORIO is the author of Monstress (Ecco/HarperCollins), and teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California. In 2014, he was the Inaugural Paris Review Writer-in-Residence at the Standard Hotel in New York City.

  BINYAVANGA WAINAINA was born in Nakuru, Kenya. He is the founder of the magazine, Kwani? and author of the memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, a New York Times Notable Book of 2011. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 “Most Influential People in the World” in 2014.

  REBECCA WALKER is an award-winning writer and lecturer, named by Time magazine as one of the most influential leaders of her generation. She is the author of the memoirs Black, White, and Jewish and Baby Love, and the editor of the anthologies To Be Real, What Makes a Man, One Big Happy Family, and Black Cool. Her most recent novel is Adé: A Love Story.

  BARRY YOURGRAU’s books of stories include Wearing Dad’s Head, Haunted Traveler, and The Sadness of Sex, which was also made into a film in which the author starred. His memoir, Mess, is forthcoming. He lives in New York and part-time in Istanbul.

  ALEJANDRO ZAMBRA was born in Santiago de Chile in 1975. He is the author of Bonsai, The Private Lives Of Trees, Ways Of Going Home, and My Documents. Some of his short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope and Mcsweeney’s.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank all the people whose views I have drawn. It has truly been an honor and a joy to be able to see and absorb all these wonderful places even without ever having left my studio. When I close my eyes, I can still see all of your views. I would also like to thank all the people who have helped me gather the photographic material, who have put me in contact with the writers, and who have supported this project. I unfortunately cannot list all of you here, as you have been so many. Thanks to Clay Risen and Aviva Michaelov of the New York Times, who were great supporters of the series. I am especially grateful to David Shipley, who initially envisioned the series in a broader and more inspiring way than I could have ever imagined, and to Scott Moyers, who championed the idea from the very beginning all the way through to its becoming a book. At Penguin Press, I’d like to thank, among others, Mally Anderson and Claire Vaccaro. A very special thanks to Lorin Stein, Clare Fentress, and the Paris Review staff for the care and attention they have dedicated to the series. A heartfelt thanks to Luke Ingram and everyone at the Wylie Agency, who so patiently and consistently helped with this incredibly time-consuming and energy-absorbing cumulative effort every step of the way, and especially Rebecca Nagel, whom I cannot thank enough for her dedication, support, and guidance throughout the entire project.

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