This month, our selection of noteworthy titles include a collection of revolutionary Hindi poetry, an erotic thriller from an extraordinary Chilean modernist, an incisive novel concerning the disabled body in contemporary Japan, an intimate socio-philosophical contemplation of a loved one’s life and death by one of France’s foremost intellectuals, and more.
The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Scribner, 2025
Review by Xiao Yue Shan
There’s something seductive about the nightmare, perhaps because fear is the most vivifying sensation, perhaps because beauty and horror are so finely intertwined. In Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy, the night-terror has never looked so exquisite, so shimmering. With an eye for the luminous and ear for the otherworldly, familiar gothic tropes are here relieved from their muted gloom; a chimeric language sings the shadows awake, and in this chorus even the most basic signifiers of darkness regain their fearsomeness, mysticism, sensual enthrallment. The cockroach has a gleam, a crunch; a derelict cathedral is as diaphanous as a dragonfly’s wing. There are the recognisable plot-pieces—violent sacraments, echoing halls, and a wasted world—but those who command fear’s aesthetic know that the most disturbing capacity of pain and transgression lies not in their repellence, but their strange and unpronounceable allure. It is not the torturous that Bazterrica is adept at bringing to life, but the smile that slowly creeps across the face of the tortured, when they are somewhere we can no longer reach.
The Unworthy is a post-apocalyptic convent story, wherein the only known patch of livable land is occupied by the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a cult that is at once spiritually vacuous and deeply devotional, with its faith reserved more for the House’s singular rites, rituals, and rules than any principle or entity. As is the standard for any secluded sect that positions oblivion as the only alternative to obeyance, the Sisterhood’s hierarchy is strict and immovable, the leaders are mysterious and merciless, the eroticism is violent, the violence is erotic, and the practices are senseless but methodical. The founder and head of the House is a man, but in the name of Sisterhood, all his acolytes are woman: some are servants, some are the Unworthy, some are Chosen, some are Enlightened—and only this latter group is given contact with the one known only as He. One guess as to what that means. Our nameless narrator wants to rise through the ranks, but stubborn fragments of selfhood prevent her from completely assimilating into the Sisterhood’s processions. She still has memories, desires—though they are but frayed remains.
For a world that is covered in a damp, ruinous haze (the aftermath of some climate disaster), and for all the church’s windowless rooms and unlit corners, there is a tremendous amount of light in the pages of The Unworthy. An acolyte is immolated and is ‘incredibly beautiful, like a firebird’. Sunlight comes in ‘small circles . . . through the leaves’. Colours filter through panes of stained glass, translucent and splendid. Through Sarah Moses’s haunting translation, Bazterrica’s novel set up its spectacles like a proper horror-show, but throughout, its emotional spine is established in such precise alignments of contrasts. Freedom is only the possibility of open gaps between immovable bars, and silence is just the sharp edge of a noise’s shattering. In describing these phenomenological separations and distinctions in a reality of unified order and brutal taxonomy—where one is definitively categorised but also expected to melt seamlessly into a unified orthodoxy—The Unworthy measures the mind’s ability to navigate between oppositions and wholeness: how individuality is sculpted by an infinite number of borders, and how these borders constantly shift, or disappear, or deepen. There is never any fixed line between agony and relief, between being somebody and nobody, between enchantment and revulsion, but Bazterrica shines a light on where the frontiers occasionally appear.
The World Is Made Up Every Day by Alok Dhanwa, translated from the Hindi by Saudamini Deo, Seagull Books, 2025
Review by Jonathon Atkinson
If, as Alok Dhanwa’s stirring title proclaims, The World Is Made Up Every Day, then everything that’s exploitative or dominating about life today can be redressed tomorrow. But as the book goes on, the title’s ambiguity becomes apparent: it also issues a warning, cautioning that any form of emancipation accomplished today is fragile: it can easily be undone.
Dhanwa, born in 1948 in the northern Indian state of Bihar, identifies with Naxalism—the ongoing attempt, influenced by Maoist ideology and tactics, of immiserated Indians to contest their country’s economic policies. In The World Is Made Up Every Day, the first book-length translation of Dhanwa’s poems to appear in English, his commitment to the Naxalite movement is most affecting when he focuses on the daily texture of disenfranchisement; when the poems grade into abstraction, their effect is diminished.
This is clearest when the two tendencies surface in close proximity:
Now, after years
I haven’t forgotten
Ma’s singing in the evening
Under the moonlight
The falling of wild berries near the river
I saved all this from
The storm of sorrow.
The problem here isn’t Dhanwa’s lack of adherence to some dogmatic notion of ‘no ideas but in things’; but at least in translation, the image in that last line—‘The storm of sorrow’—scans as readymade, particularly in contrast to the sharpness of those wild berries falling near the river.
Seagull Books has used a very light editorial touch in contextualising Dhanwa’s poems. The individual poems aren’t dated, so it’s unclear when they were written during Naxalism’s nearly sixty years of existence. The collection also lacks an introduction or afterword, in which an editor might have provided some information about the movement. When it was founded in 1967, its adherents were focused on challenging the colonial land tenancy system, which India had retained after gaining independence from Britain two decades before. But since resurfacing in the 1990s, the movement has focused on fighting the Indian government’s privatization of public-sector mining operations. Today, the Naxalists remain one of the most indefatigable left-wing forces in India. Narendra Modi has repeatedly committed his government to eradicating the insurgency—first by 2024, and when that year came and went, by 2026.
Still, much of The World Is Made Up Every Day is unmistakably resonant. Since finishing the collection, I keep thinking of a long poem titled ‘Kite’. It too features a storm, but unlike the earlier “storm of sorrow,” this one is specific: not an inert image, but a vivid evocation of a still-unfolding process. In the poem, after the bad weather lifts, a group of kids head outside to fly kites: ‘The world’s thinnest bamboo stick may fly / the so delicate world of kites and threads might begin / The so delicate world of children and birds’ eyes.’
There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2025
Review by Michelle Chan Schmidt
Though I spent three years living in Copenhagen, I only read Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy once I’d moved away and missed the city. Surely I was also nostalgic for the last of my adolescence, the strain of which Ditlevsen documents to heartbreaking effect in her memoirs. Those same lifelong growing pains flood this selection that spans her poetic life, from 1939 to the posthumous publications after her death in 1976.
There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die was published in Copenhagen in 2017 and has now been luminously translated into English by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. Its title originates in a poem from her 1955 collection, A Woman’s Mind; in the poem, Ditlevsen stealthily lowers this bell jar of a chiasmus over the young, undying girl,—‘she is no longer me, and I no longer her’,—a contrastive storm that blows her words open from the beginning of this compilation to its end.
The ballistic, conjunctive ‘but’ splits the neo-Romantic ballast of Ditlevsen’s early verse (first published when Ditlevsen was only twenty-two!) down its rhymed seams. In ‘Rain’, Ditlevsen writes that ‘[the absentminded city] can’t understand the thirst of yellow fields, / but stones and people can also drink / [ . . . ] the late sweetness of autumn’, ascribing a kind of life to the dead grey slate of the wintry city. Later, Ditlevsen’s inversions grow more sophisticated and slip into enjambment and accumulative wordplay, which Smith and Russell render with depth and complexity.
If you read the Trilogy first, then you’ll witness There Lives a Young Girl’s confessional abstractions with a kind of plummeting grimness, for you know that alongside the maturing of her poetic voice, other events have conspired with Ditlevsen’s circumstances to culminate in her divorce, addiction, and untimely suicide. The poet grows old—‘Your age / tightens across / your chest like a / dress sewn / for someone else’—and into other personas—‘My name is Lola. / I died, / technically, / by my own hand / at the woman’s shelter . . .’—but never ceases to record. Her words chip at the wall of forgetting.
In an essay published on Asymptote’s blog, Tiina Nunnally proffers her story of translating Ditlevsen’s memoirs, explicating the links of admiration and womanhood that forged Nunnally’s first translations in 1982. Smith and Russell saturate There Lives a Young Girl with the same verve, the same spellbinding dedication to speaking in Ditlevsen’s words for the lost and the undying. The author lives.
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria by José Donoso, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, New Directions, 2025
Review by Ben Goldman
Is it possible for porn to be humorous? This question came to mind as I was reading José Donoso’s The Mysterious Disappearance of the Marquise of Loria, translated by Megan McDowell—not because it is pornographic (though erotic it is), but because the descriptions of its titular character’s sexual exploits are so funny, so horrid, and so explicitly, tremendously drawn, that this gem of a novel seems to provide one answer to the much-debated question of where we draw the line between erotic literature and pornography: porn is only funny by accident, while art knows what it’s up to.
In the novel, beautiful Blanca Arias is a transplant to Madrid from Nicaragua. Though inexperienced, her sexual cravings—and, as it turns out, those of society at large—are belied by the prim milieu she enters. Hilarious, daring set pieces ensue, and here is another difference, perhaps, between art and porn: reading Donoso, you root for Blanca’s pleasure, not your own—if we put aside, of course, the pleasure of reading.
Another distinction: porn knows not death, but Donoso does. Only months after marrying the rich man who represents the dream of all her sexual desires, Blanca is suddenly widowed, and though she is genuinely in mourning, sex soon resumes its hold over her in unexpected ways—as does death. In this world, no creature, no apparently sexless woman or mysterious dog named Luna, is without a brimming, uncontrollable sexuality. . . nor is anyone immortal.
If The Mysterious Disappearance, a kind of queer thriller, reminds one that sex stands above death, it also suggests that money floats atop both. If only Blanca were so free as the true libertine! Yet financial matters are always hanging over her—such as her mother-in-law’s attempts to hold on to her late son’s inheritance. It is with these elements in play that Blanca perpetually courts great danger in the search of sexual majesty and personal power. The world Donoso constructs is one that attempts only with the thinnest veneer to dissemble its true motivations—but it is also one impregnated with wit, irony, and double entendre. There, the underside of a not-so-buttoned up society is exposed, and in its nakedness, Donoso lets loose a sexual farce of mysterious consequence.
The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman by Didier Eribon, translated from the French by Michael Lucey, Semiotext(e), 2025
Review by Jonathon Atkinson
In the early chapters of The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Didier Eribon seems to be writing a straightforward biography of his mother: her unprecedented feeling of liberation following the death of her husband (whom she never loved), her resistance to moving to a nursing home, and her rapid decline upon arriving there. But as the book goes on, Eribon’s focus drifts. He lingers over details, repeating himself; sentences keep trailing off in ellipses.
The Life follows up on Eribon’s previous memoir, Returning to Reims (2009), in which Eribon excavated his working-class upbringing in rural France: his family’s shift from leftist politics to the hard right, and his own enduring shame about growing up gay and poor. Both works are defined by Eribon’s conversationally philosophical tone, which in Returning has a certain stabilising effect, his intellectual repertoire serving as a defense against the baffling whorl of the real. At times, that book reads like a polished lecture. The Life, by comparison, is less settled than its predecessor. Eribon marshals references to Foucault and Bourdieu, de Beauvoir and Sartre, but he just keeps going in circles, struggling to make sense of his mother’s thwarted life.
His efforts break down in an extraordinary chapter near the end of the book, ‘Scenes from Daily Life’, an inventory of luminous anecdotes. Here is the pulverizing shame Eribon felt while accompanying his mother on her second job, putting publicity flyers into mailboxes; the fifteen-minute nap she used to take between the end of her factory shift and her domestic chores; his gift to her, after he left home, of a bottle of expensive perfume, which she never opened. The otherwise incessant commentary and analysis fall away, with the exception of a single parenthetical:
(I find it bizarre how today all of this, which seems to me as self-evident as it is elusive or undefinable, becomes false as soon as I write it down. . . . It seems important to make the effort to reconstruct it, and yet I cannot manage to do so.)
It is a devastating caveat. One senses that he could just keep adding to this list; it could swallow the book whole. And yet there is still so much he can’t say.
The Wolves of Staro Selo by Zdravka Evtimova, translated from the Bulgarian by Yana Ellis, Héloïse Press, 2025
Review by Matilda Nevin
An empty pistol that still somehow fires, men who move like shadows, instances of hellebore poisoning, a woman shaped ‘like the muzzle of a shotgun’, and a man who radiates an affecting beauty: in Zdravka Evtimova’s The Wolves of Staro Selo, translated by Yana Ellis, we are plunged into a fairytale-like, folkloric world. The text warns, however, that ‘there [are] no fairytales in this town’. Instead, the brutal realities of this deprived area are depicted in painstaking detail, with its itinerant workers, impoverished townspeople, and high rates of crime.
The Wolves of Staro Selo follows one family, composed of the fierce but often demonised healer, Elena; her husband, the beautiful Damyan; their granddaughter Damyana; as well as their absent son and disappearing daughter-in-law. As in Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, Elena’s witchy skills and healing ability—which she has passed down to her granddaughter—provoke suspicion and revulsion, leaving her whole family open to attack. In a town seething with corruption, Elena’s resistance to the villainous Ginger Dimitar—who steals away Damyana’s beautiful mother and destroys the family’s property—places them all in danger, while for the rest of the community, Elena serves as a convenient scapegoat for the injustices they endure. Yet, gradually, begrudgingly, the townspeople begin to see Elena and her granddaughter differently, as perhaps the only ones willing, and able, to defy the status quo, despite the risk of doing so. In this world, the most marginalised—women and children—are shown to be the fiercest proponents of change.
As Evtimova excoriates the current state of Bulgarian politics, The Wolves of Staro Selo draws on traditional motifs to render the contemporary world as a place of horror, unexpected humour, and surprising levity. This dichotomy between past and present is particularly evocative in the scene that gives the novel its title, wherein Dimitar is tortured by the sounds of wolves howling—sounds which are actually coming from ‘a cement pylon’.
Evitoma’s prose is sharp, visceral and sensual—‘Howling wolves, tearing at something tough and sinewy’—and Yana Ellis’ translation, which often includes the Bulgarian, helps render this vivid landscape as at once strange and uncanny, beautiful and familiar. Focusing on the inner lives of many characters—but particularly the local women who are hit the hardest by poverty and violence—Evtimova shows how disillusionment, individualism and greed can be confronted: by solidarity, community, and childlike hope.
Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Viking Books, 2025
Review by Jonathon Atkinson
Both Saou Ichikawa, the author of Hunchback, and Shaka Ishawa, the novel’s narrator, have congenital myopathy, a condition which requires the use of an electric wheelchair and a ventilator. Like her near namesake, Shaka is a writer—although her output mostly consists of ‘online content whose purpose is largely search-engine optimization’, Internet erotica, and trolling tweets—and accordingly, the novel is full of precise, pointed characterizations of their muscular disorder. ‘The S-shaped curvature of my spine, twisted so as to crush my right lung, afforded special significance to left and right,’ Shaka writes. ‘Even when moving about inside this one-room flat of mine, I always planned each and every movement meticulously before getting up.’
Money isn’t an issue for Shaka: she lives in a care home founded by her extraordinarily wealthy parents just before they died, and spends her free time working, remotely and listlessly, toward a second degree. Hunchback’s slip of a plot follows the growing relationship between Shaka and one of her care-workers, Tanaka, who doesn’t quite qualify as a hikikomori, but comes awfully close. When he reveals he’s been reading her transgressive tweets and knows that she’s their author, they fall into a transactional liaison that Shaka finds both thrilling and profoundly disturbing.
‘Japan,’ Shaka declares in one of the novel’s bracing tangents, ‘works on the understanding that disabled people don’t exist within society.’ But Ichikawa explodes that assumption in the form of Shaka’s bracing voice. Throughout the novel, she posts a steady stream of incendiary thoughts (‘My ultimate dream is to get pregnant and have an abortion, just like a normal woman’ is perhaps the most provocative), even as she acknowledges that her Twitter account has barely any followers and she never gets any likes. She knows her behavior is alienating—‘I had to assume that people didn’t know how to respond to a bed-bound woman with a serious disability who’s constantly tweeting [such] things’—and that others may regard her as pathetic, but she persists: because she wants to mark her own presence, because she doesn’t know what else to do.
Hunchback is antically confrontational, but it’s the quieter passages that linger. The novel’s great achievement is not so much its vivid assertiveness as the melancholy that lurks beneath it. ‘I hated old things. . .’ Shaka muses at one point. ‘The longer I lived, the more my body collapsed into an ever more aberrant shape. . . It collapsed so as to live, collapsed as testament to all the time I’d withstood.’
The Colony by Annika Norlin, translated from the Swedish by Alice E. Olsson, Europa Editions, 2025
Review by Matilda Nevin
Annika Norlin’s The Colony begins with a burnt-out woman, watching an eclectic group of people as they swim, sing, and sit together. Having taken refuge in the Swedish countryside, Emelie is most drawn to the boy who seems to hover permanently at the outer edges of the group, Låke; when she first spots him, he brings to mind a kicked dog.
Is she in the presence of a cult, or something less frightening? The ‘ant colony’, as the group jokingly calls themselves, has their own mythology: a rejection of the modern world, which has hurt them all deeply in different ways, and an intention to simply exist in nature, being wholly present, doing as little harm as possible while living in a harmonious community. As one of the group’s members, Sagne—an entomologist in her previous life—explains: ‘Ants have two stomachs, one for themselves, and one to bring home food to the rest of the group’; ‘Ants were ideal—the perfect creature.’ Yet these people are far from perfection. They continue, every day, to inflict small acts of cruelty upon one another, and it is Emelie and Låke’s encounter that finally redraws the boundaries of the group, forcing them to reckon with their pasts, failures, fears, and even their futures. Her words, when she questions the others’ choices, resound ‘like a bomb’.
The Colony manages to tackle themes of environmental catastrophe, capitalism, exploitation, and care, in turn rendering human fragility, hubris, and desire without ever feeling oppressively dark. Norlin achieves this through a use of humour and playfulness; The Colony is wryly funny and sometimes scathing. Since Låke does not attend school, but learns to read and write from other members and the books gathered in the house, his language is strange: a mix of childlike enthusiasm expressed in copious exclamation marks and outdated, esoteric vocabulary. In writing about his mother, he describes her ‘[p]acing so verily around me’. This uncanny idiolect, like the strange staccato dialogue between Emelie and Låke, is captured beautifully in Alice E. Olsson’s translation.
Flashing between perspectives and time periods, the novel’s form is also constantly changing. Between the narrative of the group’s origins, Norlin veers between extracts from Emelie’s notebook, sections from Låke’s diary, and entire chapters of transcribed dialogue. This disorienting lack of linearity in The Colony mirrors the sharp twists and turns of the group’s lives in the modern world, as Norlin questions what it might take to escape it.
The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, Europa Editions, 2025
Review by Eamon McGrath
Opening in 1966, Robert Seethaler’s The Café With No Name conjures a fleeting vision of Vienna: risen from the wreckage of World War II, but not yet the affluent and global city of today. The novel revolves around a café, run by a man named Robert Simon, that serves the street vendors of the Karmelitermarkt neighbourhood in Vienna’s second district, sandwiched between the Danube canal and the river itself. When the café opens, the area is still “one of the poorest and dirtiest in Vienna, many of its basement windows still coated in the dust left behind by the war.”
Raised in a home for war orphans, Robert comes of age in a city of ruins: ‘He shovelled rubble and earth into bomb craters in the municipal park and hammered iron out of the ruins at Südbahnhof station.’ His Vienna is a city of ghosts, with ‘a skull under every paving stone’, but lured by the promise of a ‘radiant future’, Robert eventually saves up enough money by working odd jobs at the market and open his café, lovingly restoring it from a state of disuse to a sanctuary for a cast of eclectic locals and ‘lost souls’.
Chronicling the everyday dramas of the café’s patrons over its decade-long existence, the novel is more an ode to a vanished world than a portrait of any single individual. Over years of quiet, hard work, Robert and his sole employee Mila watch over their misfit regulars, who gossip, argue, find love, and stew over their disappointments, even as the city around them changes. As the years rush by, factories close, construction begins on the city’s subway system and UN headquarters, guest workers arrive, and ever more customers opt to stay home with their new TV sets.
Seethaler’s Vienna is evoked with a wistful and tender folksiness. His characters face heartbreak, loneliness, and the winds of change, but they can always return to the unnamed café. Robert reasons: ‘The world’s turning faster and faster, and now and then it throws people off course, whose lives are heavy enough as it is.’ The café is their refuge—but in a time of transience, it too must close. The farewell party is ‘a last flicker of an almost extinguished time, one last bright blaze shining out of the mist of the past’. Today, the area around Karmelitermarkt ranks among Vienna’s most bourgeois-bohemian of neighbourhoods. Seethaler’s characters would hardly recognise it.
Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, Seven Stories Press, 2025
Review by Ben Goldman
‘He took pleasure in giving me pleasure against my will,’ writes Neige Sinno about her stepfather, who repeatedly raped her throughout her childhood and early adolescence: ‘By giving me this pleasure he made me complicit in my own rape.’ While this is one of several lurid, intimate details that constitute an integral part of Sinno’s memoir Sad Tiger, translated by Natasha Lehrer, the book is not centred around the experience of rape. And why not? Because ‘the taboo in our culture, is not rape itself, which is commonplace everywhere, it is talking about it, thinking about it, analyzing it’.
Herein lies the book’s effectiveness: every hard detail, from the first assault to her stepfather’s incarceration, serves this analysis. But this determination does not mean that Sad Tiger should be mistaken for a work of triumph; one of its aims is to put the lie to the ‘myth of the survivor’. Sinno contends that ‘there can never be a happy ending for someone who was abused as a child’, and even behind the act of writing lies ambivalence. Halfway in, Sinno lists seven reasons she shouldn’t be writing her book at all: ‘I hope [this book] doesn’t have too many readers. It would mean existing in literature not for my writing but for my subject.’
Rather than her headline-grabbing story, the story is driven forward by how the experience of rape impinges on its author’s perspective. For instance, at great pains does Sinno try to inhabit her stepfather’s viewpoint, and by the time Sinno claims that a book narrated by a child rapist would be more interesting than hers, she has already invoked Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita—which she loves—as counterpoint. But Sad Tiger is not Lolita as told by Lolita; nor is it, by Sinno’s own accounting, ‘a work of great literature’, for any hint of a polished perfection ‘would make it feel like a construction, would impact its authenticity’. (One thinks of Humbert Humbert’s self-proclaimed ‘fancy prose style’.) Lolita, remarks Sinno, is often depicted on book covers as a ‘lascivious, provocative adolescent, clearly older than the Lolita in the novel, who is only twelve’. Sad Tiger, by contrast, is a searing warning, a complex attempt to understand child rape for what it really is and how we should truly view it.
At an excruciating moment, Sinno, as an adult, imagines raping her own daughter—how easy it would be. Of course, she doesn’t, though ‘moral superiority is not a real victory’. From the outside, the victims of child rape may appear to have moved on with their lives, but Sinno forcefully maintains that she is a victim and will always remain one. For her, ‘growing up to become an adult who has not raped or defiled or betrayed another person in return’ is the only ‘possible victory’—even if, in her understanding, ‘such little things don’t change anything’.
Unusual Fragments: 20th-Century Japanese Fragments, edited by Sarah Coolidge, Two Lines Press, 2025
Review by Matilda Nevin
In this collection of short stories from twentieth-century Japanese writers, editor Sarah Coolidge works with the translators Philip Price, Margaret Mitsutani, Jeffrey Angles, Brian Bergstrom, and Lucy North to call attention to the lesser-known writers of the era (at least in the Anglosphere). Bringing together four women—Taeko Kono, Takako Takahashi, Nobuko Takagi, Tomoko Yoshida—and a male author renowned for his work on queerness and masculinity, Taruho Inagaki, most of these stories trace the arc of an ordinary life as it is interrupted by a strange, transformative, and yet usually banal event. Watching a movie awakens a boy’s queer desires; getting caught in a typhoon incites a character’s irrevocable change; a wife reflects on sexuality while preparing for her husband’s imminent departure; and a hot day stirs a woman to see herself through the male gaze.
‘Husband in a Box’ by Tomoko Yoshida, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, seems the exception to this pattern. The most fantastical in the collection, this story ends with the narrator’s mother-in-law’s face warping into something resembling a rat’s, with ‘two long curved front teeth’. But despite its exceptional style, Yoshida’s story still speaks to the collection’s thematic concerns with domesticity, gendered oppression, and sexual violence.
Explored using techniques of magical realism and horror, the various narratives share a claustrophobic, unsettling atmosphere. The narrator in ‘Cage of Sand’ by Taeko Kono, translated by Lucy North, asks: ‘[W]ho would become aware of the need to shore things up only when it was too late, who would only fix things after everything had tumbled down?’ Across these tales, the centre cannot hold; in the haunting ‘The Hole in the Sky’ by Nobuko Takagi, translated by Philip Price, the sky opens in the eye of a typhoon.
Although the stories in this collection all seem to hinge on a moment of change, the transformations provide a welcome relief from a stifling sense of stagnation. These characters are already on the precipice, ready to be pushed, eager to escape their lives. The turning point might arrive ‘too late’, but the chaos brought to these characters offer them a strange liberation: an ‘unusual fragment’ interrupts their constraints.
Formally and linguistically experimental in their language and voices, this collection does not seek to bring together pieces that fit together perfectly; instead, these stories are eclectic, challenging expectation and pushing against convention.
Jonathon Atkinson‘s writing appears or is forthcoming in n+1, New Ohio Review, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. He teaches in the Language and Thinking Program at Bard, mentors with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and lives in Petaluma, California.
Ben Goldman is a writer based in Belgium. His work can be found in Washington Square Review, Sonora Review, and Words Without Borders.
Matilda Nevin is a writer and researcher based in Scotland. She has had fiction and poetry published in Dear Damsels, Banshee Lit and Popshot Mag, reviews books regularly on Instagram @thehungrybookreader, and is currently finishing her PhD in Comparative Literature.
Eamon McGrath is a writer based in Brooklyn. He writes about literature from Southeastern Europe @balkanbooks.
Michelle Chan Schmidt (she/her) is Asymptote‘s Senior Assistant Editor for fiction and a 2023 Editorial Fellow at Full Stop, where she curated the Winter 2024 special issue on ‘Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities.’ Born in Hong Kong, she has contributed reviews, interviews, and creative writing to Asymptote, The Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, La Piccioletta Barca, Public Books, and others. As the Poetry from Hong Kong mentee of the 2025 ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship Program, she is translating Hongkongese writer Tang Siu-Wa’s《眾音的反面》The Opposite of Sounds from Complex Chinese into English.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, writer, editor, and translator.
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