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Announcing our December Book Club Selection: On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf

[Maalouf] offers us a human way to experience cataclysm without masking the confusion and desperation that takes hold. . .

For our final title of 2023, we are proud to present the latest novel by acclaimed French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, whose extraordinary work weaves fantasy and history with a powerful reckoning of contemporary issues. In On the Isle of Antioch, Maalouf turns to dystopian narrative to explore the frailties and failures of human empires, drawing a surreal evolution of events that escalate from the very real threat of total global destruction. With a philosophical richness that finds footholds in Maalouf’s elegant, nebulous depictions of desire and connection, the novel is a beautiful, necessary rumination on what survival means on the precipices of so much devastation.

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.  

On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, World Editions, 2023

There is something eerie about reading Amin Maalouf’s On The Isle of Antioch during the same days described by its narrator’s journal entries. In four sections, or “notebooks”, that date from November 9 to December 9, Maalouf’s surreal, thrilling novel is told through the experiences of Alexander, an artist and one of two inhabitants on the titular island of Antioch, as he travels in this brief window of time through isolation, doom, communion, and the unexpected orders and disorders of a dying world.

Having inherited the land from his father, who had refused to sell the deed despite financial difficulties, Alexander decides, in the wake of his parents’ death, to change his life. He begins drawing, releasing work under the pseudonym Alec Zander, and moves to Antioch in a reprieve of his childhood fantasies, calling it his “ancestral island.” Believing himself to be the only inhabitant and sole owner, he’s surprised to find, while waiting for his house to be built, that a woman and writer by the name of Ève had long ago purchased the remaining portion of the island that he did not own, and, being “eager for solitude”, she too has made it her home. Ève’s been in a rut, having published one masterpiece—a novel titled The Future Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—before losing her job and retiring to Antioch, where she sleeps all day and is awake all night, trying to work.

What drives these two loners together, after months of avoiding each other’s company, is a sudden blackout. When all the lights and appliances in Alexander’s house turn off, and even the radio plays only an ominous whistling on every station, he goes to see Ève, suddenly overwhelmed by a solitude that now weighs more heavily on him than ever, and feeling “for the first time in twelve years, [that he] slightly regret[s] not living in a town or a village like an ordinary mortal.” Having previously thought of Ève only as a “silent, ghostly, almost nonexistent” presence, it is only after this incident—which turns out to be a full blackout of all communication systems—that Alexander and Ève are able to find themselves in one another’s company. READ MORE…

Leaving and Staying: Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on Kinderland

I have the responsibility to go to the end with a good book.

Our penultimate Book Club selection for this year was Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland, an exquisitely lyrical narration of childhood amidst the instabilities of poverty, underlined by an unexpectedly penetrating look into economic migration in eastern Europe. Told in the mesmerizing voice of Cristina, whose mind slips flowingly from magic to sorrow, from urgency to tenderness, the novel traces the known and unknown forces that shape our lives, during that most delicate and mutable of times: youth. In the following interview, Corobca and translator Monica Cure discuss the political context of this work, as well as their exceptionally close and collaborative partnership.

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. 

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): I wanted to ask about any autographical aspects of this novel. Liliana, are there moments here that were drawn from your own memory—or are there aspects of your experience that you wanted to include in Kinderland, but didn’t?

Liliana Corobca (LC): I’ve written nine novels, and none of them can be considered autobiographical. My first book translated into English, The Censor’s Notebook, was based on my research experience, which surrounds institutional censorship under communism. I had read about such a document (the notebook of a censor) in the archives, but I never found it, so I imagined it.

Therefore, there’s no single character with which I can identify and say: this is me. Cristina, the girl in Kinderland, is imaginary. Still, there are very special and concrete biographical elements—even if they verge more on the mystical. Kinderland is a novel about migration, a very common phenomenon in Romania and Moldova. I was born in a Moldovan village like the one in the book, and my parents were teachers who worked with children such as those in the book. They told me of many situations and stories which I used and adapted, and I also drew on my relationship with my own younger brother to write the relationship of the siblings.

Actually, I hesitated to write this novel because I have no children, and I was sure that if I wanted to write such a book, I would’ve needed to bring up children, to follow them, to observe them, and to study their reactions. But instead, I just imagined, drawing on my own experience. There are moments in the book that stem from my little village, which was by the biggest forest in Moldova; my father and I walked there a lot, and such memories are incorporated into the novel. Another source is related to the mystical experience of children. I was born in an atheist country where it was forbidden to have a Bible or to go to church, so I don’t have those more customary experiences of spirituality, but I think human beings are naturally mystical, so those scenes or passages of magic or mysticism in the book are my own. They are of my impulse. READ MORE…

Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

For our final post of the year, we decided to compile a list of opportunities for all you translators out there to apply to. Onward and upward!

Opportunities abound for the emerging translator!  Just in time for the year-end break—this will be our final post of the year—we sifted through the latest ones and compiled the best and timeliest for our new one-stop hub, “Upcoming Opportunities in Translation.” See you on the other side of the New Year!

AWARDS

SARAH MAGUIRE PRIZE

The 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation is now open for submissions. This international prize is awarded every two years to a translated book of poetry by a “poet living beyond Europe”. The winners will receive £3000, to be divided between the poet and their translator, and will be included in a Poetry Book Society promotion alongside up to seven other shortlisted titles. Past winners include Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish and Chinese poet Yang Lian.

Founded in 2020, the Prize commemorates the Poetry Translation Center’s founder, renowned poet Sarah Maguire, and seeks to celebrate the art of poetry in translation, which the PTC calls “the lifeblood of poetry”. Applications close on Monday, January 1st, 2024.

Apply here.

WORLD LITERATURE  TODAY – STUDENT TRANSLATION PRIZE

World Literature Today offers an annual competition for students enrolled in translation studies programs worldwide, and applications are open! Consistent with WLT’s commitment to serving international and university communities alike, the Student Translation Prize seeks to recognize the work of emerging translators from anywhere in the world.

Entries should include a piece of translated prose (up to 1,000 words) or three pieces of poetry, along with a cover letter. $200 will be awarded to one prose translation and one poetry translation. Both will also be published online in the summer.

Applications are due January 11th, 2024.

Apply here.

MO HABIB TRANSLATION PRIZE IN PERSIAN LITERATURE

The Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at UW is thrilled to announce that the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature is open for submissions for its second cycle. In partnership with the Mo Habib Memorial Foundation and Deep Vellum Publishing, this prize aims to commemorate the life of Mohammed Habib through the celebration of Persian literary works.

This cycle will focus on Persian poetry from the 10th century CE to the present day. Bi- or multilingual projects are more than welcome, as are collections of poems from more than one author. Applicants should submit a cover letter, a CV, and a sample of the proposed translation by March 1st2024. The winning translation will be awarded $10,000 and will be published by Deep Vellum.

Apply here. READ MORE…

The Best Gift This Holiday Season

Who doesn’t love a year of adventurous reads—chosen from the latest in translation and delivered directly to their door?

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Share the gift of world literature today! 

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from Bulgaria and Egypt!

This week, our editors-at-large report from Bulgaria and Egypt, taking us to book fairs and prize ceremonies. From the passing of a giant of Egyptian children’s literature to the arrival of literary stars in Bulgaria, read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Sofia International Book Fair graced the beginning of December. It took place over five days in the National Palace of Culture and saw the participation of approximately 160 publishing houses. Its motto was, quite fittingly, “We create stories. We create history.”

In an interview for the Nova News channel, Veselin Todorov, former longtime chairman of the Bulgarian Book Association revealed some intriguing details about the fair’s conception: “We began this tradition fifty-five years ago. However, we are celebrating our golden jubilee only now because on several occasions during socialist times, it was decided for the fair to be held every other year instead of every year. It all started back in 1968, in the Universiada Hall. Todor Zhivkov [former de facto leader of Bulgaria] inaugurated the event—a pompous and noisy affair. He even claimed it was one of the biggest such fairs in Eastern Europe.”

Literary critic Amelia Licheva also commented on the festival in her opening-day interview for the independent media platform Toest: “The boldest ambition of the team in charge of the cultural program (both Daria Karapetkova and I are part of it this year) is to attract real stars. Bulgaria is a small market with a bad image abroad and it is rather difficult, but we do not give up easily. Actually, our efforts finally paid off. The Bulgarian public will be able to meet with Franco Moretti, Leïla Slimani, Dacia Maraini, Stefan Hertmans, Ia Genberg, and Agustina Bazterrica. We are hoping to cultivate a taste in the audience for the issues of global importance and get more people to attend these discussions. This would mean a success not only for the festival but also for the role of literature in the present day.”

What better way to end 2023 than with hope for the literary future of 2024?

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt READ MORE…

A Year of Reading the World

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of  wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far. 

Sign up for the Asymptote Book Club here and have our curated titles sent to your door!

Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

Hope: A Review of Faruk Šehić’s My Rivers

From these unlikely pairings emerges a soul-shredding collection that is nevertheless immensely hopeful.

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by S.D. Curtis, Istros Books, 2023

In his native Bosnia, Faruk Šehić is known for his poems and the regular opinion pieces he writes for the weekly magazine BH Dani [Bosnia-Herzegovina Days], but he first came to the attention of English-language readers with a novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in 2016. A second fiction work, Under Pressure, followed in 2019, and both books were widely reviewed and praised for their poetic narratives—a difficult task when writing about the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. He achieved this by participating in, witnessing, and describing those events, restoring human dignity to the neglected living and the memory of the dead.

My Rivers is Šehić’s first collection of poetry to be translated into English, in an excellent rendering by S.D. Curtis. Here, the imagination and the presence of dignity continues simply and powerfully through his subjects and settings, crafting a postwar future shared by the survivors of all sides. The resulting collection is an act of amazing meliorism and reconciliation that summons the strength of the “Mangled Generation,” as they are known in former Yugoslvia. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Peter Nielsen

One lives, / or goes feral in other ways.

Moments from the lives of small animals are captured and made into poetry by Peter Nielsen (tr. Matt Travers). In “A Little Understanding” a story emerges from tracks in thick snow. A mouse’s footprints meet those of something larger, and then the footprints disappear. Cooperation is surmised—an unexpected and heart-warming interpretation of the spoor. The titular bench of Nielsen’s second poem peeks out from a thicket of scenes and memories, where we see people together and birds in concert, each spreading messages with their bodies.

A Little Understanding

Animals help each other. It’s not always seen,
but if one goes out when there’s newly fallen snow,
you’ll often be able to follow a trail. You’ll see, for example,
the faint trace of a mouse that has come running.
Further on you may see another larger set of tracks
cross the mouse’s path. Often, you’ll now experience that the big
animal has helped the little animal on its way in the
cumbersome snow, since it’s only the big tracks
that continue. This is how the animals help each other.

A Parsley-green Bench

I anxiously greeted a friend who passed with the car window rolled down.
He registered me fleetingly and proceeded to stop in the middle of the traffic,
but I waved him on. Can you spread a message in any other way? A comforting
letter perhaps? Besides, my masseuse is waiting. And she doesn’t wait. She’s kind of there,
dawdling across the body, finding what the rest of us are looking for shortly before we begin
to search.

The episodes in one’s day like to go along, not across. One lives,
or goes feral in other ways. A bench peeks out from the edge of the forest.
The waders are flying up in formation, passing close together
in a rush over the sandbank. White undersides. After a lightning fast
twist of the body: black-grey. The moment after: white again.

Translated from the Danish by Matt Travers

Peter Nielsen is a Danish poet’s poet. Educated as an administrator in
the local counci’s wages department, Nielsen began to write full-time after earning the three-year Danish Arts Foundation Grant in 1980 for his first major poetry collection ‘Kan sparsommelighed redde proletariatet?’ (‘Can Economising Save the Proletariat?’). Since then, he has been extremely productive writer who has published over twenty poetry collections, half a dozen novels, a set of children’s books and is the Danish translator for several major poets of international repute, including Paul Celan and the Swedish Nobel prize winner, Tomas Tranströmer. He was awarded the Danish Arts Foundation Lifelong Honorary Grant in 1999, and was the recipient of the Adam Oehlenschlaeger, Emil Aarestrup, Herman Bang and Johannes Ewald Fund in 2016. 

Yet despite critical renown, he has also proved extremely reluctant to play along with the literary promotions machine and is consequently largely unknown to the wider Danish reading public. Instead of engaging in public readings of his work, which he believes spoils a reader’s internal understanding of a poem, he lives with his wife in a distant country suburb of Aarhus and divides his time between writing poetry, translating literature and pursing a keen amateur interest in ornithology, with all three activities arguably being a part of a singular overlapping creative practice, as if his poetry is always only out there in the rushes, waiting for their time to take flight.

The poems here come from his later works. A LITTLE UNDERSTANDING comes from his 2003 collection ‘Livet foreslår’ (’Life Advises’, nominated for Nordic Council Literature Prize) and A PARSELY-GREEN BENCH can be found in his most recent 2020 collection ‘Inden årstiderne; Regnlys’ (Before the Seasons; Rainlight).

Matt Travers is a poet and translator whose works have featured in 3:AM magazine, Tripwire Journal, Firmament Magazine, Minor Literature(s), and Mercury Firs, among others. Originally from Huddersfield, England, he now lives and dwells in Aarhus, Denmark.

***

Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

What’s New in Translation: December 2023

New titles from Italy, Hungary, and Cuba!

In our final round-up of the year, we’re presenting a selection of titles that capture the human condition with various, masterful depictions and incisive intelligence. From Italy, the first volume of artist and writer Guido Buzzelli’s collected works present scrupulous and unwavering critiques of society; from Hungary, the master poet Szilárd Borbély writes the life of Kafka in relation to his father’s; from Cuba, a stunning bilingual collection from Oneyda González explores the surreal nature of the mirror.

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Buzzelli Collected Works Vol.1: The Labyrinth by Guido Buzzelli, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Floating World Comics, 2023

 Review by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

What happens if, at the end of a normal workday, a sudden blast razes the world to the ground and you become one of the few survivors? Or if, waking up on an ordinary morning, you find your head and limbs dissociating from your torso and taking off on their own? Setting the scene with these Kafkaesque premises, Italian comic master Guido Buzzelli explores the monstrosity and power of dystopian societies in his graphic novellas, The Labyrinth and Zil Zelub, with a compelling visual language that is dense yet dynamic.

Buzzelli stands apart from his peers in every way—style, form, and theme. Born into a family of artists and trained in figure drawing, he is lauded as both “the Michelangelo of monsters” for his naturalism, and “the Goya of comics” for his chimeric blend of the real and the fantastical (as pictured below). He was also one of the first Italian comic artists to tackle complex literary subjects in uncommissioned, standalone works, counter-current to the Italian comics industry of the 1960–70s that pumped out commercial series with fixed characters and simplistic plots. As a self-proclaimed “man in doubt,” Buzzelli also rebelled against the progressivism of 1960s Italy, satirising the hypocrisy of political discourse and the violence of utopian mirages while alluding to the political upheaval at the time, from terrorist bombings to murky electoral campaigns. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary updates from The Philippines, Central America, and North Macedonia!

In this week of literary updates, our news range from recent award winners to support for incarcerated writers by PEN centres around the globe. Read further to catch up on the Guadalajara International Book fair, PEN Philippines’ statement on ‘The Day of the Imprisoned Writer,’ and a new contribution to Macedonian cultural studies!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines

On ‘The Day of the Imprisoned Writer,’ commemorated annually November 15, PEN Philippines joined PEN centres across the globe in issuing a statement calling for the release of Filipino poets Amanda Socorro Lacaba Echanis, Adora Faye de Vera, and Benito C. Quilloy, children’s book author Eduardo Sarmiento, and journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio—incarcerated writers who have been arrested on trumped-up charges and detained for years. “We continue to raise our voices to call for their release, and for the Philippine government to serve these detainees the justice that is due them under our system of laws—as is but right,” the statement declared. 

PEN centres globally have also demanded the release of Iryna Danylovych (Occupied Crimea), María Cristina Garrido Rodríguez (Cuba), Soulaimane Raissouni (Morocco), and Go Sherab Gyatso (Occupied Tibet). “PEN Philippines has been championing this cause for the past 65 years, and we continue to uphold that advocacy,” PEN Philippines furthers.

READ MORE…

Texts in Context: Ayelet Ben-Yishai on the Historicization of Crisis

I know that the violence today, and the occupation of which it is part, has a history and a politics which are man-made and can thus be unmade.

In her fascinating monograph, Genres of Emergency: Forms of Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English, author and professor Ayelet Ben-Yishai examines the relationship between fiction and history through the novels centering around the Emergency in India—a drastic instance of president Indira Gandhi’s imposition of power. Tracing the ways that this period continuously resurfaced in literary works, Ben-Yishai uses genre and textuality to consider how writing is not only a reflection of the world, but an active force that moves through it. In this interview, she gives her insight on this central thought, and also discusses the fundamental structure of global crises, the dangerous concept of inevitability, and some of India’s most important titles. 

Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Could you tell us about Genres of Emergency?

Ayelet Ben-Yishai (ABY): Genres of Emergency is about what might be the most momentous political event that contemporary readers have never heard of. In June 1975, Indira Gandhi, the third Prime Minister of India, imposed a State of Emergency throughout the country in response to what she called a “conspiracy” against her. Convicted of corruption and threatened by a growing opposition and mass demonstrations, Gandhi acted ruthlessly. Basic civil liberties were suspended, thousands were detained without trial, censorship imposed, and corruption reached new heights. Surprisingly lifted after twenty months, the Emergency became an anomaly in India’s democratic history—and was all but forgotten for many years, except, significantly, from literary fiction. 

A group of novels in English, written about the period in the late twentieth century, thus forms my corpus for Genres of Emergency. Why, I wondered, did these novels return to the Emergency, long after it ended and was forgotten? There are of course different answers to this question, but overall, I would say that going back allowed the authors of such fiction to think about the ways in which the Emergency was both a one-off anomaly, and of a piece with the longer arc of Indian history and politics: a crisis for sure, but also in continuity with India’s past and future.

KB: The book was written during a different emergency: during the height of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. Did those conditions shape the argument at all, or did you find yourself noticing how your argument addressed or diagnosed that present? Did those resonances seem different from the ones you have just described?

AYB: COVID-19 brought a renewed consideration of states of emergency, employed variously world-wide to combat the global health crisis. In many of these countries, India and Israel prominent among them, the emergency measures sat far too easily with ongoing erosions of democratic government and governance. The severe limitations to individual and collective rights carried out for the sake of public health seemed oddly in keeping with those already in place in the name of “security” or “public safety.”

As I was revising my chapters and coalescing them while under lockdown at home, the connections between my research and my surroundings came fast and strong. Refracted in the pandemic emergency, it became clearer in my study that emergencies worldwide are not only similar to past emergencies, but that they are constructed on a template of “emergency”: a structure within which an emergency could be comprehended despite its ostensible singularity. In other words, emergencies are unprecedented, but need to be recognizably so. READ MORE…

Call for Submissions: On Palestine

Submit your pieces on Palestine to the blog by January 31.

Palestinian Weather Forecast 

Gaza is answering Pablo Neruda’s question, from LXVI poem in Book of Questions:

In which language does rain fall
over tormented cities?

Listen closely:

Its first shower is in the language of semiotics: deafening whirs; shaking grounds; curling heads; thumping smoke; …
Then comes the downpour in the language of math: sequence of raids; multiplied fears; subtracted lives; divided families; added damages; …
Lastly, a never-ending chilling squall in the universal language—no not music—, that is grief: when the heavy blanket is uncloaked, the glacier proves to be thickening.

Since words are stifled by politicians at the desks of the international community, Gazans have to scream to protest Israeli collective punishment—like banning electricity and water supply to 2.3 million Gazans—to supply this year’s season of rain. 

Until freedom’s dawn breaks, take care to stay sane in the shelter-less, sealed-off, open-air prison. 

—Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, and ABC manager

These words from Carol Khoury set the tone for the Asymptote blog’s call for submissions for a series of posts focused on Palestine. We are seeking dispatches from Palestine and reflections on Palestinian identity and Palestinian struggle. We are particularly interested in pieces written by writers or translators, or pieces that take up questions about language and literature in relation to the current conflict and its historical roots.

Please send pitches or completed drafts to blog@asymptotejournal.com by January 31.

Translation Tuesday: “The Fly” by Linda Lê

Cervantes, Panizza, Soseki, and Hoffmann had all talked of dogs and cats; why shouldn’t I make a fly my muse?

A writer is stuck, buzzing with contempt for his departed wife. Suddenly, he is liberated by an uncommon muse. Words fly! stories swarm! This Translation Tuesday, we present an at once deeply sympathetic and totally absurd short story by Linda Lê. Hear from translator Alex Nelson on the influence of diaspora on the author’s repertoire, including The Fly:

“Within the ranks of other diasporic writers, Lê recontextualizes her postcolonial exile in her work by considering the blurred lines between language, representation, and form. Lê addresses themes such as the figure of the double, of the relationship between hosts and guests, of the danger of strangers through unexpectedly light-hearted prose, resulting at once in an entertaining story for the reader and a glimmer of the profound. This quality of Lê’s writing was both my priority to translate with fidelity and my greatest challenge when translating.” READ MORE…