Book Club

The Powerful Motion of the Text: An Interview with Martina Vidaić and Ellen Elias-Bursać

October 16, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ellen Sprague

[The novel's] not about the war or the post-war era, nor any of the themes that readers usually expect from the Balkans or from Croatia.

In Bedbugs, Croatian writer Martina Vidaić applies the epistolary to full-throttle effect, drawing out nearly two hundred pages of a woman’s complex and impassioned pursuit of selfhood and liberation. Through a voice that is humorously inviting, incisively driven, and utterly idiosyncratic, the novel draws from the architecture of Zagreb, the “unhappy villages” of the countryside, the omnipresent strangeness of the world and its people, and the turmoil of an intelligent, haunted mind to iterate our contemporaneity, its violence, its absurdity. Ellen Elias-Bursać’s English translation is alluring in its freneticism, all resulting in one hell of a ride.

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. 

Ellen Sprague (ES): I’m really glad that a Croatian title has come to the Asymptote Book Club. And this is not just any book for so many reasons; one of them being the fact that it won the EU Prize for Literature in 2023. I wonder if you might have anything to say about how this book came to the attention of the EU Prize and its ultimate awarding.

Martina Vidaić (MV): I wrote this book in 2021, and with the Croatian edition, there were some critics who liked it, and some others not. It didn’t have a lot of success, actually, with the Croatian awards—but I didn’t expect much because Bedbugs is a pretty unconventional book for the Croatian context.

Still, I hoped for a little bit more regarding the reception in general, and I was very, very surprised when a Croatian jury for the European Union Prize for Literature chose this book to be nominated. The prize is mostly for emerging authors—such as those who haven’t been translated much or at all. The authors don’t have to be young, but there are a number of criteria; if they’re nominating a novel, for example, then it has to be at least the author’s second novel. It’s a very nice award for young poets and writers, because it then offers the opportunity for translation. Obviously, I was very happy when I was nominated, but I really didn’t expect anything. The Prize isn’t limited to just countries in the EU—other European countries are included, forty-one in total, but divided into cycles. Every year, the cycle has thirteen or fourteen countries, and in 2023, Croatia turned out to be included, with my book ending up as the overall winner.

I was very lucky that Ellen was translator of the sample pages submitted. I think that was very important, because the jury decided based on those forty pages.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (ESB): Also, Sandorf Passage were very pleased when they were able to publish it, and the translation itself of the winning book is subsidized by the European Union, so that makes it nice for everyone. It’s a wonderful thing to be part of the whole operation.  READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić

September 29, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ellen Sprague

Vidaić’s novel calls out and works within irreconcilable contrasts: inside and outside, urban and rural, educated and less so. . .

In Bedbugs, both the environment and the individual are veering on the precipice of ruin. Pushing the frenetic and confessional potentials of the epistolary form, Martina Vidaić charts the psychological dissolution of her protagonist with the constant incursion of her disintegrating surroundings, resulting in an enthralling collision of misfortune, trauma, momentum, and one’s own instinct for survival. This sense of doom, balanced with acerbic wit and paced mystery, fuels the Croatian writer’s distinctive, absorbing investigation into our contemporary human conundrums of alienation and dread—but also our stubborn, headlong insistence of going onward. 

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. 

Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Sandorf Passage, 2025

The structural overview or the room-by-room discovery: these are two basic ways to describe a living space. The first gives context, while the second demands patience—and some faith, especially if the space is messy. In Bedbugs (Stenjice, 2021), Croatian writer Martina Vidaić’s second novel, some faith is needed as the story ramps up. When the reader sees that the entire book is written without a single paragraph break, they will know that it might take some focus to follow along—even with the expert translation of Ellen Elias-Bursać, who is no stranger to Croatian language and literature. But this dense journey into the winner of the 2023 European Union Prize for Literature is worth taking for the entirety of the grounded story, and even more so for the inventive, fluid metaphors and descriptive passages that carry the reader to the conclusion, even if it’s not a tidy one.

From the first line, both sardonic humor and bemusing doom abound. “I am writing to you, Hladna, my cold friend, because I happen to know you’re the only person who won’t laugh when I say that the day the ants chewed holes in my underwear, I finally had to face up to the fact that my downfall was a certainty.” The narrator’s dramatics feel a little overdone, but they still make me chuckle—and this is even before the bedbugs, which according to her Googling: “once they get into an apartment, bedbugs are extremely difficult to get rid of.” Throughout the novel that amounts to a 180-page letter, Gorana Hrabrov’s downfall may be certain, but the course always feels like somehow it could trend upward. This woman is smart and, like a bedbug, extremely difficult to get rid of; will she make it?   READ MORE…

Living Inside the Text: An Interview with Marilyn Booth on Translating Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor

September 18, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

I do think it’s essential, as a translator, to bring empathy to a text, to make that empathy work in the translation, when it is appropriate.

Syrian writer Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor is a searingly surreal portrait of the physical and psychic wounds that war inflicts on the most vulnerable among us. Narrated with lyrical intensity by thirteen-year-old Kamiran, the novel blends the brutal reality with Kafkaesque metaphor, depicting Syria’s painful conflict and the ways by which its abhorrent violence is processed and internalized. Furthering this work’s poignant impact is its lucid, flowing translation by renowned author and translator Marilyn Booth; in this interview, she speaks to us about remaining faithful to voice, handling stylistic variations, and her much-admired history with Arabic literature.

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. 

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF):  What first drew you to Safe Corridor and to Jan Dost’s work in particular?

Marilyn Booth (MB): I first met Jan at the Emirates LitFest in Dubai, just before the COVID pandemic. We had a wonderful conversation about literature and life, and I left with a couple of his books. When I read Safe Corridor (ممرّ آمن), I was absolutely blown away. Since then, I’ve read several more of his novels, though not all of them yet.

Jan is not only prolific but remarkably versatile—a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, and he also writes compelling historical fiction. Distinctive narrative voices are what most draw me, as both reader and translator, and that is precisely what I found in Jan’s work. He is a meticulous stylist, with hardly a wasted word. For a translator, that makes the work more demanding, but also deeply rewarding. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Safe Corridor by Jan Dost

August 28, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Amidst Safe Corridor’s war, the child has become the historian, recording what adults try to forget.

“Children,” Jan Dost tells us, “grow up quickly in wars.” In his bold and unflinching Safe Corridor, the author demonstrates this brutal reality through the eyes of a young narrator caught within Syria’s civil conflict, resulting in a phantasmagorical, gripping account that not only captures the violent facts, but also the mind’s attempts to accept them. As Dost moves seamlessly between the surreal, the absurd, the tragic, and the enraging, the novel engages with the true consequences and aftermaths of loss: who—or what—one becomes after surviving the unthinkable.

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. 

Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, DarArab, 2025

“On the evening when young Kamiran began to realise that he was turning into a lump of chalk, rain was bucketing down.” With this devastatingly surreal image, Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor—gracefully translated by Marilyn Booth—immerses its readers in a scene that brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A Syrian-Kurdish writer-translator based in Germany, Dost is one of Syria’s most important living authors with sixteen novels to his name, most of which center the realities and consequences of his home nation’s civil war. Safe Corridor, originally published in Arabic in 2019 as Mamar Āmin, entrusts this testimony of a devastated country to a voice least equipped—and yet most fated—to bear it. Told through a fragile, furious, and often surreal narration, the novel captures how war is not only fought on battlefields but also inscribed upon the bodies and imaginations of children. As the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish puts it in his poem “The War Will End”:

I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.

Roland Gary, in his introduction to Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, states that the Czech writer’s work “belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century . . . because his sense of man’s fate is deeply bound up with the atrocities and nightmares of the age.” Similar atrocities have persisted into our own century, ensuring that Kafka’s worlds remain an enduring source of inspiration for many writers worldwide—especially Arab novelists. They are the worlds of the absurd, marked by estrangement and fear, wherein one is perpetually hounded by unseen forces they cannot name, condemned to live within utter futility. READ MORE…

The Poetics of Fatherhood: A Conversation with Robin Myers on Translating Andrés Neuman’s A Father Is Born

August 21, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

[P]reservation in translation is a conversation, opening the work to new and unexpected places.

Andrés Neuman’s A Father Is Born, translated with delicate precision by Robin Myers, is a quietly powerful meditation on fatherhood, language, and identity. This slender volume delicately weaves poetic vignettes and prose reflections, capturing the intimate transformation of becoming a parent, and Myers, having worked on the translation during her own pregnancy, brings an empathetic awareness to the text’s subtle rhythms and linguistic surprises. The dialogue also touches on linguistic shifts, cultural inheritance, and the vibrant literary ‎scenes of Buenos Aires and Mexico City—culminating in a tender exploration of voice, translation, and the evolving nature of home.

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. 

Maddy Robinson (MR): The book is such a quietly beautiful collection of aphorisms, blending poetry and prose to explore the experience of fatherhood. When you’re tasked with finding a narrative voice so closely aligned with the author’s own, how does that compare to translating fiction?

Robin Myers (RM): That’s a wonderful question. Having worked with both life writing and fiction, I honestly don’t feel there’s a huge difference. What matters most is paying close attention to what the language is doing on the page—trying to understand and honor the author’s choices.

For this particular book, it falls along a spectrum of Andrés’s styles. I’ve had the honor of translating his work before—both his early novel Bariloche, which he wrote at a very young age, and also a book of his poetry. What I find remarkable about A Father Is Born is how it combines his novelistic sensibility with the precision of poetry; there’s something about the spareness and distilled quality of this book that I also find in his fiction. The voice emerges from those deliberate decisions.

The text is elliptical, presenting quick vignette-like scenes, from the interior world of preparing for fatherhood to welcoming the child, and the intensity of early parenthood. It also beautifully captures the child’s formation and psyche. It was important for me to attend to the imagery and the surprising, somewhat unconventional sentence structures Andrés uses—which are rarely predictable. Translating this invited me to stay alert to that strangeness in his sentences.

The book is deeply earnest but also includes humor, sometimes self-deprecating. I also tried to retain those moments with their original oddness in English.

MR: As a reader, one of the remarkable things about books like this is how we experience them differently depending on where we are in life. I think the same is true of translation: a book arrives at a time in your life when you least expect it. I happen to know that this book found you at a very fitting moment in your life. Could you talk about that a bit? READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: A Father is Born by Andrés Neuman

July 31, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

[Neuman] exposes this version of love for what it is, an ecstatic and embarrassing dissolution of the self.

In his latest and perhaps most personal work, Argentine writer Andrés Neuman probes his newfound role as a father, reckoning with the masculine and the paternal with trepidation, honesty, and most of all, wonder. The arrival of a child is here fortified with the poetry of discoveries—developing ultrasounds, the first tentative words—and the sublime language of an expanded self, as both father and son come to find their new places in the world. At once a universal and a deeply private story, A Father is Born is a testament to where the mind goes when it is led by love.

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. 

A Father is Born by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Open Letter, 2025

Andrés Neuman’s bios often begin by describing him as a son—specifically, that of Argentinian musicians who emigrated to Spain in the early 1990s. This intimate history has previously been explored in his writing, including in a collection of poetry about his dying mother, as well as a novel based on the dictatorship suffered by his family in Argentina. Now, continuing this occupation with lineage is a book that sees him wrested into a different position within the family: as a father to his newborn baby. A Father is Born was originally two separate texts, but arrives in English as a happy side effect of their translation by Robin Myers. The first, Umbilical, is a patient and forensic study of his and, to a lesser extent, his partner’s experience of expecting and then raising their child, Telmo, while the second, Small Speaker, explores the boy’s first forays into language and the mysterious assembly of a lexicon.

‘Little by little, I’m birthed as I speak to you.’ Each page of A Father is Born is akin to a poetic diary entry, ranging from the descriptive to the self-reflective. In the first section of Umbilical, titled ‘The Imagination’, Neuman explores the psychic nature of the fatherly bond pre-partum, detailing the subconscious effort of conjuring a loving connection to his future child. These opening chapters hum with the low frequency worries of a figure who knows about the precarity of life and miraculous ‘overlapping fates’ of ancestry: ‘. . . hands over hands over hands.’ In his wanderings around an expectant house, he realises how such fragility applies to the story he is building,

“More than their creator, I feel like their host,” your mother confesses.
Now I imagine us in concentric circles: you travel within a reality within our reality, which exists within ceaseless curves. What am I, then, in this home where your mother’s womb rocks and sways? Who do I inhabit?

READ MORE…

To Bring the People with Us: An Interview with Paul Larkin on Translating Henrik Pontoppidan

July 23, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

The only safeguard against tyranny is democratic (and spiritual/intellectual) courage.

Throughout his life and literary career, Henrik Pontoppidan held an unflinching eye on the culture and time that surrounded him, pinning down what he saw as its most spectacular failures in characteristically incisive, comic, and penetrating fictions. This ability to portrait society earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1917, and today, he continues to be hailed by some as ‘Denmark’s greatest realist’. A recently published compilation of his two novellas, gathered under the title The White Bear, was our Book Club selection for the month of June, and in it one finds Pontoppidan at his most reflective and honest, telling the stories of hypocritical morality and doomed love. In this following interview, we speak with translator Paul Larkin about his discovery of this under-celebrated author, Pontoppidan’s relevance in our current political climate, and what individualism means in these works.

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.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): Despite being a Nobel laureate, Henrik Pontoppidan has a relatively low profile in the Anglosphere; could you tell us a bit about how you came to discover his work, and what drew you into translating it?

Paul Larkin (PL): It is actually a deeply interesting question. I first came across Pontoppidan’s works whilst still a young man, working as a deck-boy in the Danish merchant navy. This navy has a very well organised library service, which did not just furnish books to ships but also films and—if I recall properly—audio material, which was mainly in cassette format back then. And this material was by no means all of the ‘tabloid’ variety. Much of it was serious literature, serious celluloid stuff on a 16mm format. By about a year and a half into my service, I had enough Danish to comprehend good writers like Pontoppidan, and the first short story I read was ‘Den første Gendarm’ (The First Gendarme)—see illustration. This had me laughing out loud, as Pontoppidan sends up the timid villagers seeking to somehow get the better of the lone, armed gendarme during a tense period in modern Danish history when the state sought to impose draconian laws. Eventually a barking dog does the job for them. The villagers then concocted their own legends . . .

pontoppidan_1

By the time I got to University, I realised, of course, that there was a lot more to Pontoppidan’s bow than the short story format, social realist tales, and caustic fables. However, it was not until I read the magnificent A Fortunate Man that I resolved to translate Pontoppidan. I am still amazed at how little of his work has made its way into English.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: The White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan

June 30, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Pontoppidan illustrates the continual tension between a contextual existence and the acknowledgment of our own freedoms. . .

Henrik Pontoppidan was one of the greatest writers and social critics of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Denmark, yet his works were only introduced to English readers over one hundred years later. Rife with cultural insight, no-holds-barred excoriations, and a firm conviction in the potential of the individual, The White Bear—a newly published collection of his two novellas—provides a valuable entrance into a writer deeply suspicious of the hypocrisies and repressions of modern life, one whom Georg Lukács praised as rendering ‘possible a journey through a really vital and dynamic life-totality by its semblance of movement’.

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 White Bear by Henrik Pontoppidan, translated from the Danish by Paul Larkin, New York Review Books, 2025

In discussing why we continue to revisit canonical tragedies despite always knowing how they will end, the classicist Bryan Doerries speaks to the worth of spectating on the human capacity for trying. Our myths are full of overwhelmingly fatalistic forces: of destiny, of divine fury, of mysterious arrivals, of certain pains. Yet they are ever-resonant to us not because of any sadistic pleasure to be derived from their characters’ sufferings, but because they have the potential to ‘wake us up to the slim possibility of human agency, of making a choice that averts imminent disaster before it’s too late’. For those in the stories, they walk certainly into their terrible ends—yet for us in the audience, we are given knowledge of the brief moments where things could have been different, where a single turn, or conversation, or even just a few extra minutes of time, could save us and the people we love. Perhaps in taking that understanding back home from the theatre into our own lives, we will have sufficient courage to live not in apathy but in boldness, knowing that there is only one thing that can possibly stand up against chance, and that is choice.

READ MORE…

Unhappy Ending: An Interview with Franziska Gänsler and Imogen Taylor

June 26, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

I wanted to connect my area with a more urgent threat of climate crisis.

A sweltering combination of domestic turmoil, existential ennui, and an increasingly threatening final disaster, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer presents the portrait of fractures both geographic and internal, translated with a natural erudition by Imogen Taylor. Set in a German spa town on the verge of being consumed by wildfire, the novel tells of a young woman who receives a pair of surprising visitors, and in this disruption of her melancholy routine, a spark of desire is awakened—something that could prove to be illuminating, or all-consuming. 

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.

Rachel Stanyon: Franziska, you’ve had a lot of success with this debut novel in Germany; translations and film rights have been sold, and it’s received some glowing reviews in the English-language press. And Imogen, you’ve got twenty translations under your belt. How did you each get where you are now?

Franziska Gänsler (FG): I always wrote. It was my main interest even as a child, but I never felt that it could be a profession—it’s so uncertain. I’m not from an artistic family, so I didn’t know how to get there. I ended up studying to become a teacher of art and English, and had stopped writing for a few years; I was painting and doing other things creatively, then somehow I took it up again. Then writing just took over all of my time. I was lucky because I was supposed to be painting, but my professor at university allowed me to write instead. She was from the French-speaking part of Switzerland and couldn’t even read what I wrote, but she always signed off on everything. I started entering competitions, and from there my agent saw my work.

I actually wrote one book prior to this one, but nobody wanted to publish it. And then with Eternal Summer we came to Kein & Aber, which is my publishing house in German, and I’m still with them.

Imogen Taylor (IT): I think for me, it was a coincidence. I studied French and German, and then moved to Berlin after my BA in England. People started asking me to translate because they knew I could speak German and English, so I took odd jobs on for neighbours and friends. I was paid in bottles of wine for one of my first jobs. It wasn’t really very serious, and I carried on studying, with a master’s and a PhD. I was still doing some translation on the side, but not very much or seriously. And then I gradually realized that was what I really wanted to do, more than academic work. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler

May 29, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Gänsler compellingly blurs the lines between heroine and villain, as well as between compassion and self-preservation. . .

The still-young genre of climate fiction—or ‘cli-fi’—dreams of inspiring change, yet critics have pointed out that its overwhelmingly dystopian narratives are more likely to trigger paralysis or apathy; if we’re doomed, what’s the point? Within this contemporary affliction of passivity, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer juxtaposes its burning world with a potent human story of choice, stasis, and compassions, cementing its varied cast in an unmistakably contemporary mode, yet with the same ethical conundrums that have confounded us since time immemorial. The sheer breadth of our current problems can wither us into an insular complacency, but Gänsler powerfully points us towards the matter of our freedom. We’re delighted to present this timely novel as our Book Club selection for the month of May—it’s a hot one.

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.   

Eternal Summer by Franziska Gänsler, translated from the German by Imogen Taylor, Other Press, 2025

Once upon a time, the promise of an eternal summer may have seemed idyllic. In the popular imagination, the season has so often signified carefree vacations, sandy shores and glittering waters, balmy nights and languid mornings, the well-deserved time-out from a life of hard work or study. But it’s 2025. Summers have become increasingly hot. And long. And dry. I can vividly remember the eerie smog and the smell of smoke in the air as the 2019-20 bushfires raged across the southeast of Australia; even though I was hundreds of kilometres from any active fires, I had my first, pre-COVID experience of donning a mask for daily activities. Holidays were cancelled. New Year’s celebrations abandoned. Beach towns evacuated. This is the summer of our times—and sometimes even winter, too; just this January, southern California saw wildfires spreading into urban areas, decimating homes and taking lives and livelihoods, while less well-publicised infernos have also blazed through parts of South Korea and South Africa.

Somewhere in what seems to be Bavaria, Franziska Gänsler’s Eternal Summer is sweltering a few years from now, in a future where the climate target of a 1.5°C threshold is no longer a goal even for activists. It’s October, and an empty spa resort is being threatened by the fires raging through the nearby conifer forests for the fifth or sixth year in a row. It all seems hard to keep track for Iris, who is living out her own lonely summer days in this hotel that she inherited, sunbathing and checking the latest weather warnings—but only when the situation isn’t so dire that they’re played over roaming loudspeakers: ‘Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut. Stay home.’ Although she’s aware of the danger and trusts the climate science, her physical and economic precarity—hotel bookings are no longer allowed, even if anyone actually wanted to take the waters in this water-restricted spa town—are not enough for Iris to leave. She has no one and nowhere to go to. READ MORE…

A Sacred Collaboration with Nature: An Interview with Natalia García Freire and Victor Meadowcroft

May 22, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

I try to find answers in nature, in the mountains, the volcanoes, the animals—I wait for them to tell me something.

One finds a symphony of lyricism, naturalism, and generational phantasms in A Carnival of Atrocities, the latest novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire and our Book Club selection for the month of May. Through a succession of perspectives that enmesh and build, a town and its chaotic history comes into view, and with it an illumination of postcolonial fractures, ecological conflicts, and tensions between the human and the divine. In this following interview, the author and her translator, Victor Meadowcroft, speak to us about the creation and the English rhythms of this complex narrative, as well as its place in the great, varied canon of Latin American writing.

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.   

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I would like to start by asking both of you about the title of the novel, A Carnival of Atrocities. The original title in Spanish is Trajiste contigo el viento, which could be translated like You Brought The Wind With You, highlighting the mythical connection between Mildred—the character at the center of the novel—and nature.

Victor Meadowcroft (VM): That was actually a publisher’s decision. My original working title was the literal translation of You brought the wind with you. We also changed the title of Natalia’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong To Us (originally, Nuestra piel muerta), so that could possibly be why they decided to do the same with the second one. Or maybe they thought that the title didn’t sound as nice as it does in Spanish, because they had asked me to look through the book to see if I could find some lines that might work well. I came up with a list of ten possible titles and the publisher loved A Carnival of Atrocities; at one point she said she wanted to call all her books A Carnival of Atrocities from then on. And Natalia was very happy to go with that title, so it was a publisher led decision, rather than a translator led one.

RES: What are your opinions on the title, Natalia?

READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire

April 30, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by René Esaú Sánchez

A dark chorus . . . unfurling a portrait of an unraveling community.

In Ecuadoran writer Natalia García Freire’s latest novel, A Carnival of Atrocities, rising from the landscape is a swirling, multivocal, and vivid portrait of a small town torn apart by prejudices and suspicion. There may be something rotten buried deep in the earth—but perhaps it is history itself. With an expert, distinguished lyricism translated melodiously by Victor Meadowcroft, García Freire aims her incisive sights on the violence and hatred that pervade amidst dissenting belief systems, gesturing towards the ways a limited, desperate existence can further inhibit our shortsighted perspectives.

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.   

A Carnival of Atrocities by Natalia García Freire, translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft, World Editions, 2025

There is something about a fictional town that allows their inventors to bend the rules of everyday life—to infuse these imagined destinations with magic, tragedy, and often fear. In novels like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, the respective towns of Macondo and Comala have become canonical spaces to reflect on death, family, faith, tradition, and the world itself. Natalia García Freire’s A Carnival of Atrocities is no exception: in the fictional town of Cocuán, myth, brutality, and poetic cruelty intertwine.

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Baptism of Fire: An Interview with David Limon

April 24, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Michael Tate

We’re not just translating for an English-speaking audience, but potentially influencing how the work is understood worldwide.

In our most recent selection for Book Club, we were delighted to feature Evald Flisar’s winding, intertextual My Kingdom is Dying, which takes the long, venerable, and shifting work of storytelling as both its structure and its occupation. As its protagonist recalls a lifetime spent under the fascinations and complexities of fiction, one is taken through a crowded literary landscape where stories and realities collaborate to create the multiplying halls of memory, and philosophical preoccupations of the writer’s craft are constantly interrogating the capacities and functions of invention. In this interview, Michael Tate speaks to David Limon, the translator of this fascinating text, touching on the realities of Slovene-English translation, the particularities of Filsar, and his own illustrious literary journey.

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.   

Michael Tate (MT): I thought we’d start off today by asking for an overview of your life as a translator, starting from the beginning.

David Limon (DL): Well, at school, I did French, like almost every person in the (English) school system. Then at university, I studied English literature and philosophy, but then later, I did a master’s in linguistics, and got into teaching for a while. The first job I had was in Nigeria, which obviously has nothing to do with Slovene, but the second job I had was in Yugoslavia—which still existed—and obviously, Slovenia was one of the Yugoslav republics.

One of the main languages in Yugoslavia was then known as Serbo-Croatian, but there were also other languages, such as Macedonian and Slovene and Albanian. I ended up in the Republic of Slovenia, I met a young lady, and I loved and married her; this is really why I learned Slovene, because of my wife, and partly because her parents didn’t speak English. Her father did speak German, and he used to speak to me in German, thinking: well, English and German are fairly close, he’ll understand. I didn’t, so I thought that I’ll have to learn Slovene. READ MORE…

Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: On My Kingdom Is Dying by Evald Flisar

March 31, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Michael Tate

This is a book that presents art reflecting reality (or reality reflecting art) at its most potent and bizarre.

Having made his mark on nearly every literary genre from playwriting to children’s books, Slovenian author Evald Flisar has plenty to say about language and its multiplicity. So it is that a life lived in (and through) letters is at the centre of the wondrous and wandering My Kingdom Is Dying, the author’s latest novel to be translated into English, and our Book Club selection for the month of March. Following an aged writer in his recollections, Flisar constructs the barrier between memory and fiction as exceptionally porous in a mind prone to hyperbole, intertextuality, and philosophical ideals of narrative, making way for an astute investigation into the confabulation at the centre of our worldly regard. Here is the self as a living archive, as un-fact-checked autobiographies and indexes—as if each writer, each storyteller is a living incarnation of literature itself.

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.   

My Kingdom is Dying by Evald Flisar, translated from the Slovene by David Limon, Istros Books, 2025 

At the beginning of Evald Flisar’s latest novel, My Kingdom is Dying, a hypochondriac writer has just broken both his wrists in a bizarre fall, catalysing a decay of home and body that progresses with worrying speed. While convalescing, he lists all the maladies experienced throughout his long and distinguished career—thus far, he says he has

fallen ill three times with malaria (on one of these occasions with falciparum, which almost killed me), as well as typhoid fever, Legionnaire’s disease, pneumonia and Dengue fever . . . But then other things appeared: increased stomach acid (stress, said the doctor) . . . problems with my spine and vertebrae, I often had to spend a month immobile in bed . . . and then unexplained pains . . . my body was disintegrating. . .

He acquires a carer to aid him in the healing process, and with this, the reader is gradually drawn into a world wherein the two become increasingly physically and emotionally entwined. A literary tale about storytelling wouldn’t be complete without someone taking the role of Scheherazade, and with the arrival of the incredulous but devoted carer, the writer is given a perfect audience. As he narrates his own life, he is met by an enraptured, encouraging ear that is always wanting more.

The relentlessness of his self-obsession, iterated with stimulating humour, is continually exacted through his stories, and through their twists and turns, one eventually comes to understand and appreciate the literary goals of the real-life author: to compose a gentle satire about the process of writing literary fiction, and to shine a light into the odd situations authors occasionally find themselves in. READ MORE…