Honouring Amílcar Cabral

December 11, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Bethlehem Attfield

. . . the issues Cabral championed throughout his life . . . remain as relevant today and resonate with other social movements.

Poet, revolutionary, scientist, politician: Amílcar Cabral took many roles throughout his extraordinary life, including leading the nationalist movements of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Admired for his staunch ideals and his uncompromising vision of pan-Africanism, many of his ideas continue to be found in anti-oppression rhetorics and movements all over the world. In this essay, Bethlehem Attfield takes a look at his legacy—one that has spread far beyond the African continent—fifty years after his nation’s independence.

This year, Cape Verde is celebrating a special milestone: the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s independence. Yet, the celebrations actually began the year before, in honour of what would have been the hundredth birthday of the country’s founding hero, Amílcar Cabral (1924–73). Cabral was a political leader who founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), and led an armed struggle to free both nations from Portuguese colonial rule. While he is best remembered as a prominent anticolonial figure across Africa, Cabral also left a powerful legacy through his writing, poetry, and cultural ideas, many of which are collected in the volume Resistance and Decolonization, translated by Dan Wood.

Particularly intriguing are his theories concerning culture; he regarded the promotion of national spirit among the rural peasantry, whose lives remained unaffected by imperialism, as vital to national liberation. However, in terms of language use, he differed from most anticolonial leaders who condemn the destructive impact of colonial language on the cultural fabric and psyche of the colonised people. Instead, Cabral argued that the colonial suppression of cultural life in Africa was ineffective, writing:

Except for cases of genocide or the violent reduction of native populations to cultural and social insignificance, the epoch of colonization was not sufficient, at least in Africa, to bring about any significant destruction or degradation of the essential elements of the culture and traditions of the colonized peoples.

READ MORE…

Visual Spotlight: Mahwish Chishty on Challenging the Reality of Modern Warfare

December 10, 2025  |  in Uncategorized, Visual Art  |  by Mahwish Chishty

Art is not detached from reality; it is reality, often dark and violent, that impels artists to create work that may address that reality.

As 2025 draws towards its close and we begin to reflect on the year, one unescapable fact is that it was another year of the world at war, when the terrors wrought by modern weaponry and those who deploy it has become only too clear. In this context, we would like to revisit our feature on the work of Mahwish Chishty from our Summer 2014 issue. In War Machines, Chishty painted traditional Pakistani ‘truck art’ over photos of military drones, calling attention to the terror of the modern war machine by contrasting it with a representation of beauty. Chishty’s work feels as resonant and relevant today as it did then, both as a way of giving voice to horror and of resisting it.

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Q&A with Mahwish Chishty

For those of our readers unfamiliar with Pakistani ‘truck art,’ can you explain what it is?

‘Truck art,’ sometimes referred to as ‘jingle art,’ has recently become a cultural phenomenon in Pakistan. In ‘truck art,’ trucks (but also rickshaws and buses) are painted inside out, in elaborate colors. The decoration of vehicles is, of course, common practice in many countries but Pakistani (and Afghani) truck art is unique because of the pervasiveness of its decoration. Virtually all privately owned trucks in Pakistan (and Afghanistan) are decorated in a way that varies from region to region. I was introduced to this cultural practice back in 1999 while I was attending the National College of Arts in Lahore and this phenomenon of myriad colors and styles superimposed over dull grey metal has always intrigued me.

Elsewhere you have mentioned that culturally loaded text sometimes accompanies the colorful ‘truck art’ and you appropriate both text and ‘truck art’ in your miniature paintings of military drones. Firstly, can you tell us more about this text, and secondly, what do you hope to achieve by appropriating ‘truck art’ in your depiction of war machines?

In the ‘truck art’ genre, certain texts are repeatedly written and, because of the beautiful way in which they are repeatedly written, aestheticized for the viewer. Content-wise, these texts may express the truck owner’s political or religious leanings; they may also be poetry, or movie trivia. In my paintings, I either borrow the imagery and texts wholesale, or improvise.

By presenting the colorful iconography and texts within the silhouette of a drone, I hope to open up a conversation about omnipresent ‘truck art’ and the not-so-visible presence of drones in that region. ‘Truck art’ originated in Afghanistan and spread across the border into Pakistan—the same Pakistan/Afghanistan border that is now a war zone. Truck drivers use their mode of transportation as a colorful form of self-expression; drone operators, however, are invested in remaining anonymous. In nature, bright colors attract attention; in art, they also serve the practical purpose of drawing viewers into the work. And just as in nature, where certain combinations of bright colors index an animal’s deadliness, here the coded visual language, upon closer examination, reveals sinister elements such as snakes, guns, swords, spears, grenades, and dead fish, among others.

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What is the significance, if any, of tea stains on many of these works?

Tea staining has been used in traditional miniature painting for thousands of years as a way to start a painting with a neutral background instead of stark white. For these pieces, it works insofar as the texture and color of the tea stains depict well the aerial landscape of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, i.e. the view that drone operators would see on their computer monitors 10,000 kilometers away from the war zone.

As recently as a month ago, Pakistani fighter jets carried out raids on suspected militant hideouts in the tribal North Waziristan region, killing 80 militants. What do you think art can hope to achieve, against reality?

Art is not detached from reality; it is reality, often dark and violent, that impels artists to create work that may address that reality. In fact, many artists from this region have altered their artistic practice to express their concern and dissatisfaction about the bloodshed in that region. As a Pakistani living in the US, I’ve found it even more necessary to create work about issues that concern my people and me.

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Revisit the feature on Chishty and the portfolio of her work here.

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Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Translation Tuesday: “Priest without Judgment” by Sara Munizaga

December 9, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Sara Munizaga

Reconciling Jessica with the faith was perhaps the task God had entrusted to me in this life, the reason I had been preparing for years in silence.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a short story by Chilean writer Sara Munizaga, translated from Spanish by the author herself. In it, a Catholic priest reflects on the frustrations of his vocation, recounting numerous examples of so-called believers whose behavior belies their professed faith. His suppressed anger conflicts with his desire to embody God’s all-encompassing forgiveness. This all comes to a head when he is asked to officiate the wedding of Jessica, a former object of infatuation who, in his telling, led him on and then cruelly rejected him. Munizaga’s story is a cynical and clever exploration of religion, gender relations, and above all, the self-deceptions that control our lives.

This vocation makes you indolent: deaths, births, and people in general cease to matter, because nothing is more demoralizing to the soul than speaking of God’s love to those who are not listening. We know they come here, to the church, as a last resort—without hope and without any genuine desire to hear the Lord’s message.

They convert to religion at the last minute, under pressure, for on their deathbeds they have no salvation plan other than the one I can give them. I feel their trembling hands clutch at my cassock, trying to keep the fate of a hell they so carelessly secured for themselves from swallowing them whole. Now they fear facing the devil when death is imminent, but when they were healthy they felt immortal and could not be bothered to live virtuously or serve others.

For that reason I spare no one in my funeral sermons. It is the only time I obtain an audience held captive by grief, and I lecture them with tedious catechism texts as a punishment for their superficial and agnostic lives. I am unmoved by the widow’s inconsolable weeping or the mourners’ emotional speeches. I know they are hypocrisy; and I will not worship any god but the God of truth, my Lord Jesus Christ. It is so simple to understand: one need only look at the life of Doña Patricia. Five children, twenty-five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and every day she arrived alone at the noon mass, accompanied only by a nurse hired by the family—who preferred to pay a stranger to take charge of the woman who gave them everything. The Christmas before last, Doña Patricia confessed to me that she had kept all her relatives’ gifts, still wrapped, there at the nursing home where she lived; her family never came to see her, and she was left alone during the holidays. And yet, a year later, at her funeral, the church was overflowing—not a single seat left empty. Then she achieved the full attendance she would have desired. I wanted to have the nerve to throw those still-wrapped gifts at their faces from the very altar, but that is not the Lord’s way. He is almighty and teaches us to find forgiveness. A greater crisis will come to that family that will rouse them from the selfish stupor in which they conduct their lives.

READ MORE…

More Than a Witness: A Review of The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo and Jay Boss Rubin

December 8, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Rebecca Suzuki

Across the collection, these stories are unforgiving and gut-wrenching, a reminder that reality is often the same.

The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo, translated from the Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin, Hanging Loose Press, 2025

Each story in Esther Karin Mngodo‘s short story collection, The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories, work together to compose an intricate web, with ongoing threads of entrancement cocooning readers from beginning to end. Beautifully translated from Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin, the prose grips and refuses to let go, revealing the rawest truths of the human condition.

The collection is a mixture of realism, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction. In one of the stories, a woman and man are on a date at the theater, and one quickly realizes, in a meta turn, that the play they are watching is actually an apocalyptic story from earlier in the collection. In the middle of the play, a scream emblematizes the center of the interconnected narrative and terrifies the protagonist in the story: “I nearly went into shock. My whole body snapped to attention. I wrapped my arms around myself so I wouldn’t have to run away or hide under my seat.” Contained in this bloodcurdling scream are all the themes explored in The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories: betrayal, jealousy, negligence, violence, powerlessness, loss—feelings that so many of us suffer through alone and in silence.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 5, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield and Shatha Abdellatif

The latest from Nigeria and Palestine!

In this week’s round-up of global literary news, our editors report on the winners of the Palestine Book Awards and a worrying change of policy in Nigerian language education. Read on for more.

Shatha Abdellatif, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Palestine

On November 15, the Palestine Book Awards announced this year’s winners in Central London, honouring “the spirit of Palestine” amidst a critically transformative period. Hosted by the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), the Palestine Book Awards welcomes nominations for writing on Palestine in English from publishers and authors, with no restrictions on their geographic or national backgrounds—thus worldling the literature of/on Palestine onto the global map of literary production.

Among the supremely intelligent works from this year’s winning titles was Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, making him a two-time winner of the PBA after Against Erasure took home the award in the creative category last year. Nasser Abourahme’s The Time Beneath the Concrete—an unflinching, rigorous monograph that positions refugee camps as the key to fathom the larger question of Palestine, and by extension, the spatio-temporal struggle in the larger context of Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine—won in the academic category.  Abourahme astutely writes in his introduction: “All [Palestinians] live in the permanent temporariness of camptime, with varying degrees of extraterritorial dislocation and extralegal vulnerability.” READ MORE…

No One All the Way Down: A Review of One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello

December 4, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

. . . in One, None, and a Hundred Grand that Pirandello turns inward, eyeing the abundant fragments that compose each of us.

One, None, and a Hundred Grand by Luigi Pirandello, translated from the Italian by Sean Wilsey, Archipelago Books, 2025

Luigi Pirandello’s final novel, One, None, and a Hundred Grand, begins with a nose; the slight tilt of it, casually noted by a wife, sets off one of the most vertiginous descents into selfhood in all of literature. For Vitangelo Moscarda (meaning maggot, one of the many signifying names in this book), this offhand observation shatters a presumed unity: if his wife sees him differently from how he sees himself, who—or what—is he? What follows is a tragicomic unraveling of identity that, nearly a century later, reads with the vitality of a modern parable. In Sean Wilsey’s supple and stylish new translation, published by Archipelago Books, Pirandello’s masterpiece finds new life in an era that is just as fragmented as Moscarda’s mirror.

Though best known in the Anglophone world for his revolutionary plays—especially Six Characters in Search of an Author, which famously broke the fourth wall and dismantled the illusion of coherent identity onstage—Pirandello began his career as a philologist and prose writer, and this training in dialect and etymology shaped his understanding of identity as both an artifact of language and a performance of speech. In the theater, he would go on to stage this view with uncanny force: characters who refuse their scripts, actors who rebel against the author, spectators forced to confront their own role in meaning-making. But it is in One, None, and a Hundred Grand that Pirandello turns inward, eyeing the abundant fragments that compose each of us. READ MORE…

To Become an Afterlife: An Interview with Christian Jil Benitez on Filipino Literature in Translation

December 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

After all, with all the languages and cultures of the country, one can only speak of the ‘Philippine’ in partials. . .

Named Poet of the Year in 2018 by the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino (Commission on the Filipino Language), Christian Jil Benitez is a queer Filipino poet, scholar, and translator. His debut book, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (A Theory of Time, 2022), was awarded the Best Book of Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies at the National Book Awards in the Philippines, substantiating his important work in codifying the cultural formation of ‘Filipino time’ via the material, the poetic, and the tropical, in addition to finding an equilibrium between Western critical theory and indigenous epistemologies.

Beyond his scholarship, from positioning the bugtong (or the Tagalog riddle) as ecopoetry to recasting vernacular oral traditions as matrices of queer world-making, Benitez’s translations maintain that their critical role is not merely linguistic, but also results in a creative rebirth, of ‘translation that acknowledges, and relishes even, the transfiguration of the material as it is carried over from one containing language to another’.

In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Benitez, traversing Bangkok and Manila, about the pressures and prospects of translation in neocolonial, multilingual Philippines, as well as the ethics of barkadahan, especially when familiarity and friendship become central to the labour and logics of literary translation.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your debut, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (A Theory of Time), excavates the construct of time through Philippine-language dictionaries, poetry, historico-colonial texts, metaphors, and indigenous orality, revealing it as ecological, discursive, and material. How does ‘Filipino time’, as you’ve theorised it, diverge from Western, capitalist temporality?

Christian Jil Benitez (CJB): We commonly use ‘Filipino time’ to refer to the tendency of Filipinos to be late: to start an event in ‘Filipino time’ means to actually start one hour after the initially agreed time. The term was supposedly coined by the Americans during their occupation in the country to shame Filipinos for this behavior, but this habit has also been observed in many Southeast Asian (as well as other non-Eurowestern) contexts, and can be understood as the persistence of polychronic sensibility in these cultures despite the imposition of Eurowestern, capitalist, and patriarchal monochronicity. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Cicada Green” by Ju Donzelli

December 2, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Grace Penry

The giant cicadas came and went, hurling themselves at Iturbe. He kept waving his arms, trying to scare the bugs off.

A languid summer vacation takes a distressing turn in this short story by Argentine writer Ju Donzelli, translated from the Spanish by Grace Penry. A group of high school friends abscond to a nearby town to swim, drink, and hang out, but the relaxed atmosphere slowly grows more tense, leading to an altercation between two boys—one of them being the slender, soft-spoken Flaco Luna, an anomaly among the guys and beloved by the girls. The sudden outbreak of violence reveals the unspoken tensions of adolescence, when masculinity must be achieved through publicly dominating others, including your own friends. Between the electrifying fascination of otherness and the terrorizing brutality of conformity, the boys’ fragile ecosystem is fiercely shaken by the incident.

I don’t go on vacation with the guys from high school anymore, but with Flaco, I’d go again. The last time we were all together we went to Guayamba, one of those towns where we Santiagueños will spend a couple of days because it’s nearby, because there’s a river, because it’s cool and cheap.

In the evening, the giant cicadas started getting on our nerves. It’s always like this, but on this day in particular they screeched and screeched. They look like other cicadas, only much bigger and rounder, the area around Santiago is full of them because of the carob trees. They’d zoom past us and hit things like projectiles, making a dry sound when they slammed into the wall. That’s what’s so funny about them: they sound empty when they bang into something and they’re always acting like they want to kill themselves. If there’s a pool, the first thing they do is head straight into the water and buzz their wings until they drown and die. And if you take them out, they’ll jump right back in. It’s an infinite loop lasting half the summer. 

Whenever we’d go to Guayamba, we’d stay in Manso’s parents’ house because it’s pretty big and has a pool. Us guys had taken our clothes off, it wasn’t that hot out, but we were drunk, the humidity made the air dense, and during the siesta we’d sunbathed at the river. Plus, the power kept cutting out because it had rained, and the fans kept turning off. The girls were still in their shorts and bikinis, with their feet in the pool and hair dripping with the smell of chlorine. 

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Feminism & Imagination in Fifty-Two Stories: A Review of The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda

December 1, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Grace En-Yi Ting

Matsuda's collection also continually surprises the reader with playfulness, randomness, and pleasure. . .

The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Europa Editions, 2025

Within the new wave of openly feminist Japanese literature, Aoko Matsuda is well-known for her fierce, sharply funny critique of sexism in contemporary Japan. Her work has previously appeared in English with publications like “The Girl Who Is Getting Married” (translated by Angus Turvill) and Where the Wild Ladies Are (translated by Polly Barton), and now, with the appearance of The Woman Dies—also translated by Barton—Matsuda continues her incisive vision with fifty-two short stories that jump from the mockery of gender roles to subtler reflections on girlhood, often interspliced with delightfully whimsical commentary on the everyday.

As sexism and anti-LGBTQ stances persist in Japan, the increasing number of talented Japanese writers translated into English nonetheless reveal literary discourses that dissect and challenge the limits of how gender and sexuality are established in mainstream society. Feminist discourses in Japan are also growingly transnational, with readers eagerly devouring feminist fiction translated from English, Korean, and other languages. Matsuda herself is not only an accomplished fiction writer and essayist, but also a translator of English, bringing out Japanese iterations of works by Karen Russell and Amelia Gray, among others. The Woman Dies is a unique addition to Japanese literature in English translation—which does not include much flash fiction—and certainly introduces fresh, lively feminist perspectives. At the same time, despite how the collection is advertised, it is too limiting to suggest that all of its stories can fall under “feminism,” as many of Matsuda’s pieces—sometimes only one or two pages in length—are charming snippets of everyday life, resisting any kind of categorization. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 28, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Linnea Gradin, and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from Palestine, India, and Sweden!

This week, our editors-at-large report on the rise of audiobooks, a festival spotlighting indigenous Indian literature, and an award-winning Palestinian memoir. From visions of Paris from a prison cell to a whistling naming tradition, read on to find out more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Palestinian author Nasser Abu Srour, recently released from Israeli imprisonment, has won the prestigious 2025 Prix de la littérature arabe for his powerful prison memoir, Je suis ma liberté, translated into the French by Stéphanie Dujols. The award ceremony was held at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris on November 18, coinciding with PEN International’s Day of the Imprisoned Writer. His memoir, written over 33 years inside Israeli prisons and smuggled out piece by piece, chronicles his experiences behind bars and his resilience in the face of oppression. It originally appeared in Arabic in 2022 titled Hikaayet Jidaar (the story of a wall) and translated into the English as The Tale of a Wall by Luke Leafgren. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen

November 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

From a Turkish perspective, there is no Kurdistan . . . . Ozmen’s novel meditates on what this effacement does to someone’s subjectivity.

Dizzying, furious, scathing, and absurdist—artist and writer Sener Ozemen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories is a testament to an identity, region, and language under siege. The novel, with its many layered narratives, confronts the Turkish state’s enduring violence against its Kurdish minority, illustrating the psychic and physical fractures of oppression with intellectual complexity and emotional clarity. In attempting to disentangle the knot of selfhood from a merciless assimilating power and a growingly fragmentary everyday existence, Ozmen builds the architecture of fiction to its most veering heights, capturing all the threads of reality’s illusions, and thus resulting in one of contemporary fiction’s most vivid portraits of psychological dissolution—that which still never turns away from the need to express its truths.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

 

The Competition of Unfinished Stories by Sener Ozmen, translated from the Kurdish by Nicholas Glastonbury, Sandorf Passage, 2025

In her book Immemorial, Lauren Markham notes that “the feeling of grieving something that isn’t yet gone, and whose disappearance isn’t fully certain . . . is an eerie, off-putting one.” This liminality and its disquieting effect are what animates Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories, deftly translated by Nicholas Glastonbury. This is not only the author’s debut in the Anglosphere, but one of the first works written in Kurdish’s northern Kurmancî dialect to receive an English translation.

Ozmen is a prolific Kurdish writer and multimedia visual artist, the author of numerous books of poetry, novels and short stories, criticism, and artist books. Across his written oeuvre and artistic practice, he has drawn attention to both the urgency and difficulty of speaking from a position of marginalization; The Competition of Unfinished Stories, originally published in Kurmancî as Pêşbaziya Çîrokên Neqediyayî in 2010 and translated into Turkish as Kifayetsiz Hikâyeler Müsabakası in 2015, follows in this spirit. The novel dramatizes—in a challenging and disorienting way—that the stories one tells are always co-authored and situated, demonstrating the interrelatedness and imbrication of the self. As Judith Butler observes in Giving an Account of Oneself, “When the ‘I’ seeks to give an account of itself, an account that must include the conditions of its own emergence, it must, as a matter of necessity, become a social theorist.”  READ MORE…

Notes on the Literature of Migrant Workers

November 26, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Jianan Qian

While it remains unclear if these migrant workers’ voices will enable significant social reform, their visibility is a promising start.

Chinese literature has recently experienced a boom of “migrant workers’ writing”—largely autobiographical works produced by individuals involved in the nation’s sprawling gig and service economy. From deliverypersons to housekeepers to drivers, these marginalized laborers reveal in their writing the hardships and intersectional complexities that their positions make them vulnerable to, testifying to the thanklessness and extreme demands of their essential roles, and thus giving a pivotal view as to what constitutes the nation’s varied and persistently hegemonic social fabric. In this essay, Jianan Qian gives background to this rise and its unveiling of public secrets—the truth of what it takes to keep the enormous engine of China humming.

1.

I first heard the voices of the migrant workers not through literary works, but through popular songs. In 2010, a music video of two men singing Wang Feng’s “In the Spring” went viral on Chinese internet; in the shaky images captured by a handheld camera, the singers—later known as the duo Xuriyanggang—stood bare-chested in a cramped rented room. They were tanned, their faces and necks reddish from long hours of outdoor labor. In raw voices, they sang the chorus:

If one day, I grow old

and have nowhere to turn,

Please bury me,

Bury me in the heart of the spring.

In the original music video, Wang—a Beijing native and now an established musician—is looking nostalgically back on the spring of his youth, when he was a nameless music school student dedicated to his dream. The line “having nowhere to turn” sounds melancholic in his voice, perhaps signaling the common anxiety of aging, but in Xuriyanggang’s version, it indicates a future of being aged and homeless, speaking to the literal reality of the migrant workers looking towards it. The hukou, or household registration system in China, restricts its citizens’ access to education, healthcare, and pensions to their place of birth; thus, for many rural-born Chinese whose truncated education have forced them to take up labor jobs in major cities (turning them into “migrant workers”), they may still be deemed illegitimate residents after spending most of their lives in the cities they helped build, and thus are subject to displacement.

 

2.

Around the same time in the early 2010s, the voices of migrant workers also began to gain attention in the literary world. By committing their raw experiences to writing, they introduced the reading public to a stream of narratives that outline the deprivation, denial, and reduction consequential to the hukou system. Amongst them was Xu Lizhi, a young assembly-line worker at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, who recorded his angst in poetry. In one of his most circulated pieces, he wrote:

I swallowed a moon made of iron

They called it a screw

I swallowed the industrial sewage, the unemployment files

and youth cut short by bending over the machines

I swallowed the hustle and the displacement,

the pedestrian overpass, and life overgrown with rust

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Beanstalk by Dominika Słowik

November 25, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Jess Jensen Mitchell

On Thursday, a beanstalk started growing out of my nose.

Today’s Translation Tuesday Feature “Beanstalk”  is taken from Samosiejki (Self-Sowing, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2021), an eco-critical short story collection by the emerging Polish author Dominika Słowik. Compared to the other stories within the same collection, translator Jess Jensen Mitchell says this particular piece “has an especially light comic touch as it riffs on  bodily sensations, capitalism, and the whims of a quirky midlife woman-turned-plant. It is an ASMR for the soul, an ode to joys vegetable, animal, and mineral.” Need we say more? Read on!

On Thursday, a beanstalk started growing out of my nose.

On Saturday, it reached halfway up my forehead.

On Sunday, I was overcome with the desire to dip my feet in a cool tub of water.

On Tuesday, the first leaves appeared.

On Wednesday, without realizing what I was doing, I ran out into the rain, turned my face to the sky, and just stood there like that with my mouth agape for a good fifteen minutes.

Then I remembered how I got an F in my third year of grade school because I didn’t hand in my environmental science project. I was supposed to grow a bean sprout on a piece of moistened gauze. As luck would have it, the bean disappeared. We blamed our dog at the time, because I couldn’t have stealthily inhaled a seed, right?

I did a brief round of soul-searching. Of course I could have. I never liked my environmental science teacher.

It explained a lot. Whenever I got sick, only one of my nostrils would leak. If I started to run, I’d lose my breath immediately. I had an excellent tolerance for unpleasant smells and I was always picking my nose—despite forty-odd years on this planet, I never kicked the habit. READ MORE…

Mapping the Invisible: A Review of The Cartographer of Absences by Mia Couto

November 24, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

. . . Couto opens what we thought was settled, exposing what we buried, leaving us no choice but to witness the revelations.

The Cartographer of Absences by Mia Couto, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025

In March 2019, as Cyclone Idai bore down on Mozambique, it arrived with a weight familiar to Mia Couto. The author, born in Beira—the country’s second-largest city—in 1955, had spent decades chronicling how both natural and manmade violence has torn through his homeland, leaving open, unhealing wounds. In his latest novel, The Cartographer of Absences, the cyclone’s approach is both the temporal frame and symbolic force of such persistent fractures; the storm unearths what has been buried and almost forgotten.

The novel follows Diogo Santiago, an internationally recognized Mozambican poet, who returns to his birthplace of Beira for a literary tribute. Suffering from depression and unable to write, he sets out on the journey to ostensibly “lay his memories to rest,” and expects a ceremonial homecoming. Instead, he receives a cardboard box from Liana Campos, a mysterious resident whose grandfather once served as an inspector with PIDE—Portugal’s brutal secret police. The box contains a trove of documents from the final convulsions of Portuguese colonial rule: interrogation transcripts, confiscated poems, bureaucratic reports, and family papers. Together, they reveal the hidden architecture of violence that has shaped both Diogo and Liana’s families, including the fate of the former’s cousin, Sandro, who disappeared during the war, and the suspicious death of the latter’s mother, Almalinda. READ MORE…