Only three days into 2025, the Asymptote team is hard at work reporting on literature across the globe. In the first roundup of the year, our staff introduces a thirty-one day reading challenge of Japanese short stories, the liminal thoughts of a busy poet in European airports, and a look back on the numerous achievements of Palestinian writers throughout 2024.
Bella Creel, Blog Editor, Reporting from Japan
It’s often said that short stories and collections thereof sell poorly in the publishing market—and what a shame! There’s something about the short story, its attention to detail, the palpable shift between acts, the transience of characters and settings, that has made up some of the most impressive pieces of literature. Particularly in Japan, the short story has historically been a dominant mode of writing, pioneered by the “father of the Japanese short story” Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and is still today one of the most common genres seen in bookstores around the country.
To our delight, much of this oeuvre has been translated into English, and Read Japanese Literature (RJL), an extensive online resource for Japanese literature, has created a list of thirty-one Japanese short stories in translation available to read for free online—one for every day of January—in celebration of #JanuaryinJapan. These stories range from the great Akutagawa’s “Dreams,” a chilling and meandering tale of a paranoid artist, to Kenji Miyazawa’s satirical “The Restaurant of Many Orders,” an Alice-in-Wonderland-esque commentary on posturing and westernization following the Meiji period. Many of these stories and authors are also discussed in detail in the RJL Podcast, including deep dives into authors such as Osamu Dazai and Izumi Suzuki, historical context, and more.
If this is your first time hearing of this month’s reading challenge, don’t despair. We’re only three days into the month, and it won’t take you long to catch up—the stories are short, after all.
Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine
2024 has been a tragic year for the Palestinian; still, Palestinian authors made significant strides in the literary world, garnering prestigious awards and recognition on both regional and international stages.
In April, imprisoned novelist Basim Khandaqji won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the Booker Prize) for his novel A Mask, the Colour of the Sky. His brother Youssef and publisher Rana Idris accepted the award in Abu Dhabi. Nabil Suleiman, chair of the judging committee, confirmed that the decision was unanimous. Moroccan writer Yassin Adnan, who hosted the ceremony, emphasized that Khandaqji’s win highlights literature’s ability to transcend borders.
In the same month, Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah received the Jackson Poetry Prize for his exceptional talent, and British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad was awarded the prestigious Aspen Words Literary Prize for her novel Entering Ghost, further establishing her literary presence. Before accepting her award in New York, attendees observed a moment of silence for victims of genocide in Gaza.
In June, Mahmoud Shukair won the International Palestine Prize for Literature for his entire body of work. Alaa Halihal received the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction for Seven Letters to Umm Kulthum, which explores Palestinian sentiments during historical upheavals. In September, Palestine competed for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, with Nasser Abu Srour’s The Wall Story reaching the longlist.
In October, Palestinian writer Rowa Issam Razmaq was honored with the Fatima Al-Madoul Award for her play Kingdom of Emoji at the Sharm El-Sheikh International Festival, and in November, Lina Khalaf received the National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Something About Living, calling for an end to genocide in Gaza. In London, Amanda Najib’s children’s book Lana Makes Purple Pizza became the first children’s book to win a Palestinian Book Award.
Finally, in December, Ziad Khaddash’s short story collection was longlisted for the Al-Multaqa Short Story Prize, and Abdullah Issa’s poem “The Sky of Gaza, Hills of Jenin” won first place at the International Palestine Prize for Literature.
These achievements highlight a vibrant Palestinian literary scene amidst ongoing challenges.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Airports in Ireland and France
Whenever I travel extensively—which is after all the condition of the contemporary poet, or, in Pierre Joris’s term, the “nomad poetics” of our age—I think of Brazilian poet Waly Salomão and his “Jet-Lagged Poem” (featured in both the original and Maryam Monalisa Gharav’s English translation) in our summer 2014 issue. Nowadays the nomad is jet-lagged, and her hyper-lag is a hybrid langue, a multilingual dérive.
Stranded at airports and already swamped in deadlines these very first days of 2025, I too was indulging in such a drift across the latest news in the literatures of the regions I was crossing through or am usually exposed to. Just like in Salomão’s poem, and perhaps typical of our hyperconnected cultures, any literary event or release inevitably branches out and reaches unexpectedly remote connections.
In Ireland, legendary poet Paul Durcan, who turned 80 in October, marked this milestone with a timely selection of poems (featuring an introduction by another famous name, Colm Tóibín). Celebrated as a “national treasure” the widely praised poet and academic is also lauded for a rare gift: that of being one of the best editors of his own selections, always knowing exactly which poems to choose in order to seduce even people who have hardly heard of him. To me, even the title he picked for the selection was a proof of that: 80 at 80.
The obvious congruence (eighty poems at the age of 80) put me in mind of one of my favorite Durcan poems—“The Day Kerry Became Dublin”—where, in contrast, things do not literally add up: “the three-light windows of her breasts. . .” Inapparently converging mathematics took on more weight in my jet-lagged drifting when I came across, as an inconsistent regular, the French e-journal Poesibao and found out that no earlier than last December Jacques Roubaud had passed away.
Most likely the best-known contemporary representative of OULIPO (the French literary school of mathematics-based and procedural poetics), Roubaud was an avant-garde poet and fiction writer and, at the same time, a full-fledged established mathematician. Roubaud’s poetics has been described as impossible to disassociate from his contribution to the field of mathematics, and that quality has been seen as potentially impinging on the readability of his poems. That has nevertheless an intriguing resonance with translation, as Roubaud’s poems in the Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (ed. Mary Ann Caws, 2008), while indeed arcane, seem to blend very well (in the original, Rosmarie Waldrop’s, his own, and Richard Sieburth and Françoise Gramet’s translations) in the specific section of the collection working in and of itself as an argument about the entire trend of “1967–1980: The Explosion of the Next Generation.”
Salomão’s drowsy spirit mischievously nudges me therefore to wonder whether the relationship between poetry and maths in Roubaud’s case was indeed one of non-disjunctive association or, as in the iconic case of another poet-mathematician, Ion Barbu (pen-name of topological-spaces innovator and ring-geometry pioneer Dan Barbilian), an instance of mathematico-poetic intersemiotic translation . . .
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