It’s been our joy to serve you too. We love playing Fetch! in the name of world literature and can’t wait to see what 2019 brings.
This #GivingTuesday, throw us a bone!
Consider the following. This year alone:
- We’ve brought you new work from beloved writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Dubravka Ugrešić, Ismail Kadare, Anita Raja, Lee Chang-dong, Robert Walser, Michèle Métail, and Jon Fosse.
- We’ve added five new languages (Amharic, Igbo, Mè’phàà, Montenegrin, and Q’anjob’al) to our archive, thereby crossing the 100-mark for total number of featured languages.
- We offered a platform for international microfiction and multilingual writing, allowing voices from the margins to be heard.
- Our Book Club, which will soon enter its second year, signed up 200 subscribers over the course of its first year; these monthly bulk orders have helped independent publishers directly.
- We continued to advocate for a more inclusive world literature via quarterly educational guides, monthly podcasts, fortnightly airmails, and this very blog, published to a daily schedule. Of our blog columns, we are especially proud of the weekly Around the World with Asymptote dispatches contributed by our editors on the ground in six continents, an offering unique to Asymptote that truly expands the literary conversation.
- And most significantly perhaps, we hit our 30th issue and traced our journey from humble beginnings via a #30issues30days showcase in September 2018.
But it’s also been tough-going, as the showcase reveals. *sad puppy eyes*
Though 2018 has been kind to us (we were lucky enough to partner with LTI Korea and the Institut Ramon Llull for Korean-themed and Catalan-themed Special Features), our international setup means we are not eligible for most grants that like organizations receive. We currently have no institutional funding on the horizon, and, therefore, our future is uncertain, to say the least.
One full-time team member has been overseeing Asymptote’s smooth running for more than eight years now in the absence of any kind of proper financial remuneration, and it’s getting tougher for that team member each passing day.
If you appreciate the work we do and would like to see it continue, we hope you can help make it sustainable for us by becoming a sustaining member from as little as USD5 a month or, if you can afford it, a masthead member, as one reader did just two weeks ago.
If you prefer to make a one-time donation instead, we’d also welcome it very much. Any of these contributions would not only secure our immediate future, but also help us serve you better.
Together, we can do so much more for global literature—and even pay our contributors one day!
Wait no more: Join the Asymptote family today!
Sincerely,
Your friends at Asymptote