What stops a cancer from killing its host? What might have prevented a grandmother from dying in a refugee camp? What allows a Deliveroo rider to keep his dignity through itinerant gig-work? Perhaps it’s care: “the connections we have with others and the everyday actions we engage in for each other” (Micaela Brinsley). Care is a vital #lifesupport—a necessity up there with shelter and air. The problem is that it’s scarce, as attested to by our brand-new Summer edition spanning 35 countries and featuring an exclusive interview with 2023 Booker International Prize winner Georgi Gospodinov, 2022 Prix Goncourt winner Brigitte Giraud’s debut in English, as well as new translations of Paul Éluard and Hamid Ismailov. In settings that take us from hospital to hospital and even one assisted suicide facility, few find it, while others seek it with increasing desperation. Patrick Autréaux’s exquisite memoir of chemotherapy, for example, describes cancer as a “cold octopus . . . groping at me as though I were some bizarre object . . . embracing me, holding me back to examine whether I was corpse-like or ecstatic, content or horrified, and offering me, snatched up in death’s vulva, sensations never before imagined.” In Inga Iwasiów’s startling novel, on the other hand, the dead moon jellyfish forming a “gelatinous strip between the water and the land” becomes a buffer between the cancer-stricken narrator and intentional death (which in Pooya Monshizadeh’s devastating Red Meadow is canceled without even a refund). Against absolute loss, Honora Spicer, in this issue’s poignant Brave New World Literature entry, opened the very text that she had requested to translate one week after her grandmother died—to the wide field of “se fue.”
The hospital is also the setting for fifty percent of this issue’s Criticism section. While Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom paints a portrait of intimate life at a psychiatric hospital, Vanessa Springora’s Consent begins with a teenager being hospitalized for rheumatism, only to receive not one but two additional diagnoses during her stay. Though it’s the second of these (by a predatory gynecologist) that sets off a nationwide scandal with legal consequences, the first diagnosis very much deserves pause as well: according to the psychologist who sees her, our protagonist is “disengaged from her peers . . . isolated and vulnerable”; she struggles to “join” with others in society. This malaise is directly echoed in the trio of pieces (from Switzerland, Denmark, and South Korea) heading off the entire issue. All three are heart-wrenching portraits of alienation that speak to the current epidemic of loneliness. And, as frequent contributor Theis Ørntoft puts it in Earthly: “You need to be careful with loneliness . . . or you’ll wind up hurting yourself.”
Which brings me to why I decided, midway through the past quarter, to issue a call for submissions to a Special Feature themed on the collective—perhaps as a counterpoint to all the trapped interiority I was seeing in the Fiction lineup. Seven of the best are collected under the aegis of The Story of Us and offer a stunning diversity of allegiances. Apart from Brigitte Giraud’s brilliant piece on widows, don’t miss Micaela Brinsley’s Nothing to Be Owed—a meditation on our societal contract distilled through a series of vignettes—and Abby Minor’s The Village Elegies—about a volunteer going door to door to canvass support for her nominee. The latter stands out for its relevance vis-à-vis the current fraught political climate (with last week’s assassination attempt on Trump pushing us all closer to the brink, I feel): “when the presidents are being / elected it can get pretty low.” All of this is illustrated with sensitivity by New York-based guest artist Lananh Chu.
Having moved to Thailand for the lower cost of living—some of you may have noticed the change in address for a while now; a life update has long been overdue—one of the things I like to do to stay connected is listen to Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics Radio podcast. Dubner likes to sign off with the phrase, “Take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too.” Yes! I thought, when I first heard it. Together, we can all make up for the deficit of care. And if that “someone else” for you might extend to your favorite literary journal, I hope you’ll take just three minutes to sign up and get involved as a sustaining or masthead member. Subscribing to our Book Club is a great way to take your passion for world literature to the next level. If you’re interested in joining our team, good news: We are still looking for social media managers and marketing managers. As always, we invite submissions to our regular categories on a rolling basis; watch this page for our next Special Feature announcement, due to be released soon. Finally, don’t forget to bookmark our daily blog; follow us on Facebook, X, Threads, and our two Instagram feeds; and subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive content, giveaways, and the latest news. Until Fall 2024, stay connected!
—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief
Editorial Team for Issue July 2024
Editor-in-Chief: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)
Assistant Managing Editors: Hilary Ilkay (Canada), Daljinder Johal (UK), Marina Dora Martino (Italy), Janet Phillips (UK/Australia), Kathryn Raver (France/USA), and Alex Tan (Singapore)
Section Editors:
Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)
Caridad Svich (USA/UK)
Ian Ross Singleton (USA)
Heather Green (USA)
Danielle Pieratti (USA)
Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (USA)
Assistant Editors: M.L. Martin (Canada), Michelle Chan Schmidt (Ireland), Rachel Landau (USA), Terézia Klasová (Czech Republic), Catherine Xin Xin Yu (Canada/Italy) Willem Marx (Italy/USA), Chiara Gilberti (Germany/Italy), Fatima Jafar (USA), Tiffany Troy (USA), Vuslat Demirkoparan (USA), and Lin Chia-Wei (Taiwan)
Assistant Interview Editors: Sebastián Sánchez-Schilling and Sarah Gear
Contributing Editors: Ellen Elias-Bursac (USA), Aamer Hussein (UK), Sim Yee Chiang (Singapore), Dylan Suher (USA), and Adrian West (USA)
Art Director: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)
Editor-at-large, Bulgaria: Andriana Hamas
Editor-at-large, China: Jiaoyang Li
Editor-at-large, Croatia: Kristina Gadze
Editor-at-large, Greece: Christina Chatzitheodorou
Editors-at-large, Guatemala: José García Escobar, Rubén Lopéz, and Miranda Mazariegos
Editor-at-large, Hong Kong: Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan
Editors-at-large, India: Zohra Salih
Editor-at-large, Kenya: Wambua Muindi
Editor-at-large, North Macedonia: Sofija Popovska
Editors-at-large, Mexico: René Esaú Sánchez and Alan Mendoza Sosa
Editor-at-large, Palestine: Carol Khoury
Editor-at-large, Philippines: Alton Melvar M. Dapanas
Editor-at-large, Romania and Moldova: MARGENTO
Editor-at-Large, Spain: Marina García Pardavilla
Editor-at-large, Sweden: Eva Wissting
Editor-at-large, Uzbekistan: Filip Noubel
Editor-at-large, Vietnamese Diaspora: Thuy Dinh
Masthead for Issue July 2024
Fiction, Brave New World Literature Feature, and Interview: Lee Yew Leong
Poetry: Danielle Pieratti
Nonfiction: Ian Ross Singleton
Drama: Caridad Svich
Visual: Heather Green
Criticism: Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
The Story of Us Special Feature: Lee Yew Leong
Illustrations and Cover: Lananh Chu
Assistant Managing Editor (supervising issue production): Janet Phillips
Assistant Managing Editors (supervising Assistant Editors): Alex Tan and Marina Dora Martino
Assistant Managing Editors (supervising Editors-at-Large): Daljinder Johal and Kathryn Raver
Assistant Managing Editor (overseeing blog production): Hilary Ilkay
Chief Executive Assistant: Rachel Farmer
Senior Executive Assistants: Julie Shi, Iona Tait, and Chinmay Rastogi
Executive Assistants: Meenakshi Ajit, Haeri Lee, and Charlotte Chadwick
Blog Editors: Xiao Yue Shan, Bella Creel, and Meghan Racklin
Art Director: Lee Yew Leong
Guest Artist Liaison: Berny Tan
Senior Copy Editors: Mia Manns, Rachel Stanyon, and Maggie Wang
Copy Editors: Sophie Eliza Benbelaid, Bella Bosworth, Jennifer Busch, Willem Marx, Matilde Ribeiro, Mia Ruf, Ellen Sprague, Iona Tait, Josh Todarello, and Urooj
Technical Manager: József Szabó
Director of Outreach: Georgina Fooks
Podcast Editor: Vincent Hostak
English Social Media: Ruwa Alhayek, Livia Djelani, and Hannah Landau
French Social Media: Filip Noubel
Spanish Social Media: Sergio Serrano
Graphic Designer: Michael Laungjessadakun
Digital Editors: Matthew Redman and Julia Maria
Marketing Managers: Kate Lofthouse and Samantha Seifert
Director, Educational Arm: Sarah Nasar
Educational Arm Assistants: Mary Hillis, Marissa Lydon, and Anna Rumsby
Book Club Manager: Carol Khoury
Intern: Sarah Wang
Asymptote would like to acknowledge the support of Sohini Basak, Teodora Gandeva, Diana Senechal, Mark Cohen, Thomas Guillaume, and Jonathan Drummond.
For their generous donations this past quarter, our heartfelt thanks go too to Alan Ziegler, Alexander Dickow, Claire Hegarty, Diana Senechal, Daniel Hahn, Elizabeth Raible, Francesca Orsini, Ian Chung, Jeffrey Boyle, Jim Peak, Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Laura Green, Lynn O'Neal, Marjolijn de Jager, Mark Cohen, Martin Ingebrigtsen, Michael Barry, Monty Reid, Sharon Wood, Thomas Carroll, Ulf Jacobsen, and Velina Manolova.
