Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #8 The House of Termites by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

December 24, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Whether displacement is forced or voluntary, there is one prevailing symptom: loss.

Coming in at number eight, “The House of Termites” is a poetic essay from our Winter 2025 issue by Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (tr. Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen) that paradoxically succeeds at being both unique and universal. As she reflects on a life between borders, from Somalia to Italy to Belgium, Ali Farah ponders a question close to all migrants: What does it mean to live in exile?

This work is a treasure trove for the reflective reader. Sure to be bookmarked, there is a goldmine of pensive moments to glean wisdom from. One of many to start us off: “Migrating means disappearing into yourself, dying and being reborn, running the risk of becoming invisible, or rather, of being seen in another way.”

Whether displacement is forced or voluntary, there is one prevailing symptom: loss. There is a constant undercurrent of disconnection from the physical space one inhabits and their distant home. Ali Farah draws on the wisdom of James Baldwin to describe this condition:

My obsession had always been that of reimagining Mogadishu, my “Garden of Eden,” even if it was anything but a terrestrial paradise. “Maybe life only offers the possibility of remembering the garden or forgetting it,” Baldwin writes in Giovanni’s Room. “One thing or the other: you need strength to remember, you need another kind of strength to forget, and you need to be a hero to do both things together.” 

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #9 When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend by Bassam Yousuf

December 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

This evocative piece blends warm and melancholic notes that linger long after reading.

One day, as I was undergoing yet another round of torture from the secret police in the infamous Palestine Branch, I cried out: “Abdullah al-Daliyah!” Abdullah al-Daliyah is one of our Alawite ancestors, a saint whose name the men from my village invoke to this day when they’re in dire straits. The man torturing me suddenly stopped and yanked off my blindfold. With a wild-eyed stare, he demanded: “Who are you?”

I kept quiet, since in the opposition we were strictly forbidden ever to disclose our names. He shouted in agitation: “Say something! Are you Bassam?”

I nodded. Turning away, he marched around the interrogation room, then closed the door and continued pacing up and down without looking at me. Finally he wheeled around and asked, his eyes full of tears: “Don’t you know me?”

I shook my head. After ten years, he was unrecognizable. With a sigh, he bowed his head. “I’m Abdullah . . . ”

Occasionally, one comes across circumstances so unbelievable they can only be engineered by fate. Coming in at No. 9 in our countdown of the most-read articles of 2025, this poignant piece of nonfiction follows Syrian political activist Bassam Yousuf (tr. Katherine Van de Vate) as he reflects on his relationship with a childhood friend, Abdullah. In this essay featured in our Summer 2025 issue, Yousuf traces their parallel paths as he sides with the political opposition, and Abdullah with the Assad regime—a choice that culminates in their bitter reunion. The title gives it away: “When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #10 Attention as Predation: Fields of Influence and Omnivorous Forces of Alignment by Johanna Drucker

December 22, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Attention consumes its participants—subjects and objects alike—and in its current ravenous high scale dynamic, becomes predatory.

Before we turn the page on the tumultuous year that was 2025, let’s look back on the pieces that readers couldn’t stop reading, sharing, and talking about—i.e., our most popular articles across four massive quarterly issues. From insightful essays to mind-bending fictions, this curated-by-you selection features work from all around the world that not only captured your attention but also seized your imagination. Wonder if your own favorite made the list? Every day from now till Dec 31st, we’ll be counting down to our most-read article of the year, so come back here each day to find out!

First up at #10 is Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation: Fields of Influence and Omnivorous Forces of Alignment”—a fitting grand opening to our Fall 2025 Special Feature themed on attention, as urgent to the moment as it is riveting a read.

Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, Drucker poses a radical re-imagining of the nature of attention itself. Rather than a self-willed, intentional act, Drucker describes the exchange of attention between subject and object as a bottomless energy field where we consume as we are consumed: an ouroboric cycle where we feed off a topic as it feeds off our attention. The result is a serious argument for us all living in dystopia.

Drucker’s theory is an enlightening framework for the digital age, importantly, one that credits attention as the primary instrument of authoritarianism—Exhibit A: Donald Trump’s command of the media landscape.

Here’s a brief explanation in Drucker’s own words:

“Most recently, the Trump phenomenon demonstrates the way the accumulation of attention
becomes a social force, a type of predation on the body politic in which influence devours the
source on which it feeds . . . they become consumed in the process of absorption, returning the investment of attention to the system which, in turn increases in energy and demands more attention to sustain itself. Huge as they are, enormous as transactional beings, focal points in a massive network of attention exchange, the central figures are themselves colonized by the process. In a vulnerable individual, this can be fatal, but in a socio-pathological one the focal object inflates, feeding from an increasingly insatiable need.
. . . 
Authoritarianism works through alignment. Alignment is driven by affect and instrumentalized through attention. Attention consumes its participants—subjects and objects alike—and in its current ravenous high scale dynamic, becomes predatory. The monopoly will only be broken by distributing attention across multiple attractors the terms and values of which remain to be determined but must operate through an appeal to affect.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 19, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Shatha Abdellatif, and Wambua Muindi

The latest literary news from Palestine, Hong Kong, and Kenya!

This week, our editors-at-large report on new spaces and events for literature springing up even in the face of oppression and loss. From Gaza’s first public library to Xi Xi’s teddy bears to the legacy of a lost literary lion in Kenya, read on to find out more!

Shatha Abd El Latif, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Palestine

“There are moments in history when the creation of a library becomes an act of freedom itself.”

Those were the words of Omar and Ibrahim on the fundraiser campaign page they set up to build the first public library in Gaza after the genocide. Omar is a displaced Gazan writer from Beit Hanoun, and Ibrahim is an English school teacher and translator. On the page, Ibrahim describes a curious intellectual wrestling with the big dogs of the Western canon that eventually landed him at the feet of the literatures of the oppressed. Of this literature of resistance, he writes: “I felt that books themselves became a kind of land, and that the pen was a root no one could uproot.”

Omar and Ibrahim speak to their audience about a time when books were their only refuge from the horrors of the blockade, and tell us of the moments where they discovered that their books, pieces of their bereaved souls, survived the bombing of their houses. Omar’s documentation on social media of the dust-covered books, hours spent digging in the rubble, and carrying his books twelve times over with every displacement—sometimes in unique ways, i.e. in his keffiyeh, quickly sparked international interest in his and Ibrahim’s project.

Israel’s genocidal war destroyed at least twenty-one of Gaza’s libraries and killed over 45 writers and artists in Gaza in a soulless act of colonial vengeance, striking at the heart of a people’s cultural spirit. I was so incredibly moved as I scrolled down Omar’s Instagram and watched as he installed the library, book by book, on a dilapidated shelf in a tent. The steadfast mission they chose for themselves in the service of their community speaks to a not-so-unfamiliar spirit of resistance that Palestinians carried within themselves against the absolute annihilation of their home and history.

This project does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it is rooted within a political consciousness that hails the resisting spirit in the face of a genocidal, colonial power. What we must be wary of, nonetheless, is the temptation to glorify the struggle and pain that comes with this act of preservation and perseverance born during a genocide while shying away from confronting the structural complicity of our cultural and academic institutions in the literary genocide of Gaza’s writers, librarians, and educators.

The search for a place to house Omar and Ibrahim’s library was over early this week. Following a month and a half long search, Omar announced on his Instagram that they were finally able to find a place to start building their library. There remains a long path ahead, still.

Omar and Ibrahim’s project goes well beyond just putting together a physical library space; rather, it serves a larger mission to rebuild Gaza’s literary scene and combat Zionism’s long-in-the-making scholasticidic and epistemicidic war—and their campaign’s goals, which include “[r]ebuilding Gaza’s spirit through knowledge” and “[b]uild[ing] hope and keep[ing] culture alive,” serve as further evidence.

You can donate to Omar and Ibrahim’s campaign via this link to rebuild Gaza’s first public library.

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong READ MORE…

Unreliable Narrator, Unreliable Translator: Nicholas Glastonbury on Sener Ozmen’s The Competition of Unfinished Stories

December 18, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

. . . if we can unmake or destabilize the novel, we might similarly destabilize the nation, which warrants or conscripts the novel.

The Competition of Unfinished Stories is one of those texts that would be classified as “untranslatable” by the more cynical amongst us. Aside from addressing the intricate language politics of Turkey—namely the oppression and marginalization of Kurdish—Sener Ozmen’s text is full of jokes, narrative tangles, loose ends, shapeshifting characters, and suspicious translators. As such, the English edition of the novel is a triumph, not only in Nicholas Glastonbury’s fluid and adventurous prose, but also in his own interjections that celebrate the original’s chaos and multiplicity. In this interview, he speaks on the challenges of translating the book, authorial authority, and language’s resistance to containment.

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.   

Hilary Ilkay (HI): This is a challenging and strange book! How did you find out about it? Did you pitch it to a publisher, or was it pitched to you?

Nicholas Glastonbury (NG): I met Sener maybe six years ago. I was in Diyarbakır doing research for my PhD, and there was an organization trying to build an online platform for Kurdish literature, given all of the obstacles that it has in accessing foreign language audiences, and I did some work for them. I was aware of Sener’s work a little bit, but when I met him, I became really interested in it. He’s also a visual artist, so I became really interested in how he saw the world. He’s also written quite a few books; The Competition of Unfinished Stories is his second novel, and the title is what drew me in. After I read it, I thought, what is going on here? This is a crazy book. Then I began pitching it around, and it landed with Sandorf Passage, which I’m very happy about.

HI: I was delighted to discover Sener’s prolific artistic practice when I was reviewing the book. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you see his practice as a visual artist influencing his writing. Do you see an interplay between his art and the way that he constructs stories and narratives?

NG: I think he’s really interested in the absurd. For example, there’s one photograph of his that comes to mind; it’s a group of men hoisting a flag up a flagpole, and they’re all wearing neck braces, and they’re unable to look up at the flag. There’s a tension between violence and nation, and the obligation to nation is very much an aspect of this novel.

He has another piece, a sequence of photographs of himself dressed as Superman. He takes off his cape and uses it as a prayer rug, and the title of the work is “Supermuslim.” He’s got a real sense of humor about things that are so heavy and serious.

There was another piece he did called “Road to Tate Modern,” which is him and another artist trying to make their way to London, to the museum. They do a kind of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza act, riding a horse and a donkey, asking shepherds around the Kurdish countryside where the Tate Modern is. And the shepherds say things like, oh, it’s just over the hill. . . So there’s a sense of the distance that Kurdish cultural production has to surmount in order to reach international audiences—of course conditioned by the violences of the nation-state—that comes through in both his writing and his visual work. I think the way that his approach to writing is shaped by his visual work is how he captures images. For example, in The Competition of Unfinished Stories, the image of Neil Armstrong on the prayer mat dying stands out to me, or all the scenes of Sertac masturbating. There’s a real sense of creating these absurd tableaus, and I think that’s probably influenced by how he sees and visualizes the world through his art.

HI: You have such an impressive and interesting portfolio of translations under your belt and I’m curious, given the scope of your work, what made Ozmen’s writing unique, or what stood out about the way that he wrote? And related to that, what was the biggest challenge in trying to render this unwieldy text into English? READ MORE…

Władysław Reymont: Poland’s Chronicler of the Profane

December 17, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Sam Bowden

Reymont’s work had become so particularly Polish . . . that it once again became universal.

These days, the reading world eagerly anticipates the Swedish Academy’s annual awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature, placing bets and preparing stacks of shiny gold stickers, ready to be stamped on newly reprinted books. Yet the Prize, now over one hundred years old, has had many of its laureates fall into obscurity, either due to a seeming lack of contemporary resonance, or the changing priorities of the Academy itself. In this essay, we look towards the works of one such writer, whose pivotal titles perhaps deserve a revisit for their stylistic commitment, persistent human themes, and documentation of the times.

Władysław Reymont, Poland’s second Nobel Laureate, was born to the family Rejment in 1867; in 1892, when he was first published, he insisted on changing his name’s spelling (if not its pronunciation), in part, as Polish academic Kazimierz Wyka speculated, because of its closeness to the verb rejmentować: “to cuss” in certain Polish dialects. For some authors, this would be a humorous footnote in their biographies, but for Reymont, it proves an apt metaphor for his oeuvre. His major works—including, most famously, Ziema obiecana (The Promised Land) and Chłopi (The Peasants)—are beautiful and distinct depictions of nasty, earthy lives. Like curses disguised with respelling, they reconfigure their surprising, sometimes shocking base material, deriving elegant representations from the inelegant. Despite being drawn, like so many Polish intellectuals of his era, towards a vision of Polish nationhood that literature had to help create, Reymont opted to render Poland as a grimy, smoky, bloody place—but where he becomes intriguing, and what perhaps most compelled the Nobel Committee to award him the 1924 Prize in Literature, is when that focus on the bodily and the brutish becomes celebratory and even liberatory, for both its subjects and their nation.

Reymont was born into a Poland that was, by then, absent for decades. By 1867, the nation had been partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia for nearly seventy years. Seemingly mirroring this fragmentary state, Reymont was a shoemaker, then an actor, then a linesman on the Warsaw-Vienna Railway, then a prospective candidate at a monastery, before he made his way to writing. Nonetheless (or perhaps because of his aimless decades), Reymont had established himself as a major figure in the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement by the end of the nineteenth century, primarily through his short fiction and travel narratives. The Young Poles—working across literature, music, and art—were neo-romantics, skeptics of the old world order that seemed to edge closer to collapse with each toppled European monarchy or imperial clash, and Reymont’s best-known works are no different. In Ziema obiecana, modernity is simply decried; in Chłopi, Reymont seeks a solution by turning inwards to Poland’s rural culture, timelessly isolated from modern concerns. In both works, we meet plenty of violence, gory detail, and literary profanity, but Reymont’s choice of subject for the latter novel reframes the grit in terms that the Nobel Committee registered as transcendental and universalist. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Seven Seconds of Air by Luca Mael Milsch

December 16, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Han Smith

When I hear the keys, I have to be quick.

Do you remember your childhood fondly? Selah doesn’t. In this week’s Translation Tuesday, the nonbinary protagonist of Luca Mael Milsch’s novel Seven Seconds of Air reflects on their childhood, on the inadequacy and guilt fostered by their constant separation from their working-class mother, on their inability to communicate with a parent whose ability to care for them is limited as much by the economic necessity of constant work as it is by moments of plausibly deniable cruelty.  Brilliantly translated from the German by Han Smith, these sections, written only in the present tense, capture the mind of a child forced to grow up too quickly yet nevertheless committed to a sense of optimism. Writes Han Smith, “The word that I feel is central to Selah’s voice in this section is eigentlich, or actually / really, as in: ‘everything’s actually quite okay’ – it is an attempt at self-reassurance that surely things are fine, with the ‘but’ that follows often only implied.” Read on.

1995

She’s almost never there when I get home: she’s nearly always working late. So today I heated up a frozen lasagna and I sat with my apple juice and watched TV. The little bottles are really only for going on trips, and I’m not supposed to drink them at home. But still, I just like those bottles, and it means I don’t have to wash an extra glass. I sink right into the sofa sometimes. My mother says: melt into it. If I’m still hungry I go and check in the kitchen to see what else we have to eat, and today there was an open pack of crisps and ice-cream too, but my mother can always tell if something’s missing so it’s better to wait and see what she says. In the fridge there was a yoghurt, and I thought she might be fine with that. That was what I hoped, that it wouldn’t be too bad. Then I headed back to the living room.

Sometimes I like to touch the screen with my fingers, even if I know it isn’t allowed. I’m really not meant to go near it at all, because it isn’t safe and I might also somehow break it. But when I touch the surface, when it’s on, that is, it crackles out and I jump back with the shock. Even though I know it’s going to happen – somehow I just forget every time. I’ve actually thought quite a lot about falling through time or even disappearing completely, and I wish something could maybe pull me into the TV, into the programme I’m watching, and then I’d just be gone.

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What’s New in Translation: December 2025

December 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Dan Shurley, Hilary Ilkay, Kaelie Giffel, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Japan, Peru, Germany, Austria, Czechia, South Korea, Brazil, and Hungary!

In our final round-up of the year, we present a thrilling novel capturing the margins of Germany as the nation begins to veer into fascism, a collection gathering the voices of powerful Hungarian women poets, a Brazilian novel testifying to the colonial erasure of indigenous language and being, a series of essays considering the act of reading as an oppositional force against capitalism, and more!

kappa

Kappa by Ryonosuke Akutagawa, translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Bownas, Pushkin Press, 2025

Review by Kaelie Giffel

Even if one is unfamiliar with his work, English readers will recognize the name Ryonosuke Akutagawa from the prestigious Japanese literary prize, named after him posthumously by a friend. Kappa is a novella published in the final year of the author’s life. Pushkin Press’s reissue of Geoffrey Bownas’s 1970 translation comes on the heels of a 2023 retranslation by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and Allison Markin Powell, published by New Directions in 2023. Multiple, competing translations indicate the continued importance of Akutagawa’s work, which has a renewed urgency in our time.

Kappa is a philosophical meditation on whether difference can be encountered without violence and how we might meet others in the strange in-between spaces. Structured as a frame narrative, its inciting incident is the testimony of a patient in an unnamed mental institution. The patient speaks about meeting strange creatures with tummy pouches called Kappas. The Kappas have their own cultural, historical, and philosophical institutions and orientations to life, and the narrator lives among them for a while, alternately admiring, baffled, or repulsed as he learns more about their existence. They oppose birth control for silly reasons; sacrifice workers who have been laid off by literally eating them; prohibit artistic performance because they believe the general public to be hopelessly stupid; and are generally misogynist—female Kappas are cast as libidinous huntresses that oppress male Kappas. The narrator is bewildered by the similarities and differences between himself (Japanese) and the Kappanese. Hence, the mental institution.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 12, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Andriana Hamas, and Sayani Sarkar

Literary updates from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and India!

This week, our Editors-at-Large report on the latest in literary news from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and India. From an open submission call for Filipino literature in translation, to a controversial AI-focused poetry competition in Bulgaria and a series of award-winning Indian titles, read on to learn more.

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

Kritika Kultura, a scholarly journal of literary, language, and cultural studies published semi-annually by Ateneo de Manila University is now welcoming submissions for a Special Literary Section on Filipino Literature in Translation. Placing particular emphasis on literary translations from nearly two hundred Philippine languages into English, this special literary section will cast a critical light on the often-unseen compromises and negotiations involved in bringing these works to the Anglosphere.

Guest-edited by translator, poet, and scholar Dr Christian Jil Benitez, the folio seeks to offer more than translation. ‘The special literary section aims to show the variety of ways translators from Philippine languages mediate Filipino literature with the Anglophone world linguistically, culturally, and even institutionally,’ he said.

READ MORE…

Honouring Amílcar Cabral

December 11, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Bethlehem Attfield

. . . the issues Cabral championed throughout his life . . . remain as relevant today and resonate with other social movements.

Poet, revolutionary, scientist, politician: Amílcar Cabral took many roles throughout his extraordinary life, including leading the nationalist movements of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Admired for his staunch ideals and his uncompromising vision of pan-Africanism, many of his ideas continue to be found in anti-oppression rhetorics and movements all over the world. In this essay, Bethlehem Attfield takes a look at his legacy—one that has spread far beyond the African continent—fifty years after his nation’s independence.

This year, Cape Verde is celebrating a special milestone: the fiftieth anniversary of the nation’s independence. Yet, the celebrations actually began the year before, in honour of what would have been the hundredth birthday of the country’s founding hero, Amílcar Cabral (1924–73). Cabral was a political leader who founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), and led an armed struggle to free both nations from Portuguese colonial rule. While he is best remembered as a prominent anticolonial figure across Africa, Cabral also left a powerful legacy through his writing, poetry, and cultural ideas, many of which are collected in the volume Resistance and Decolonization, translated by Dan Wood.

Particularly intriguing are his theories concerning culture; he regarded the promotion of national spirit among the rural peasantry, whose lives remained unaffected by imperialism, as vital to national liberation. However, in terms of language use, he differed from most anticolonial leaders who condemn the destructive impact of colonial language on the cultural fabric and psyche of the colonised people. Instead, Cabral argued that the colonial suppression of cultural life in Africa was ineffective, writing:

Except for cases of genocide or the violent reduction of native populations to cultural and social insignificance, the epoch of colonization was not sufficient, at least in Africa, to bring about any significant destruction or degradation of the essential elements of the culture and traditions of the colonized peoples.

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Visual Spotlight: Mahwish Chishty on Challenging the Reality of Modern Warfare

December 10, 2025  |  in Visual Art  |  by Mahwish Chishty

Art is not detached from reality; it is reality, often dark and violent, that impels artists to create work that may address that reality.

As 2025 draws towards its close and we begin to reflect on the year, one unescapable fact is that it was another year of the world at war, when the terrors wrought by modern weaponry and those who deploy it has become only too clear. In this context, we would like to revisit our feature on the work of Mahwish Chishty from our Summer 2014 issue. In War Machines, Chishty painted traditional Pakistani ‘truck art’ over photos of military drones, calling attention to the terror of the modern war machine by contrasting it with a representation of beauty. Chishty’s work feels as resonant and relevant today as it did then, both as a way of giving voice to horror and of resisting it.

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Q&A with Mahwish Chishty

For those of our readers unfamiliar with Pakistani ‘truck art,’ can you explain what it is?

‘Truck art,’ sometimes referred to as ‘jingle art,’ has recently become a cultural phenomenon in Pakistan. In ‘truck art,’ trucks (but also rickshaws and buses) are painted inside out, in elaborate colors. The decoration of vehicles is, of course, common practice in many countries but Pakistani (and Afghani) truck art is unique because of the pervasiveness of its decoration. Virtually all privately owned trucks in Pakistan (and Afghanistan) are decorated in a way that varies from region to region. I was introduced to this cultural practice back in 1999 while I was attending the National College of Arts in Lahore and this phenomenon of myriad colors and styles superimposed over dull grey metal has always intrigued me.

Elsewhere you have mentioned that culturally loaded text sometimes accompanies the colorful ‘truck art’ and you appropriate both text and ‘truck art’ in your miniature paintings of military drones. Firstly, can you tell us more about this text, and secondly, what do you hope to achieve by appropriating ‘truck art’ in your depiction of war machines?

In the ‘truck art’ genre, certain texts are repeatedly written and, because of the beautiful way in which they are repeatedly written, aestheticized for the viewer. Content-wise, these texts may express the truck owner’s political or religious leanings; they may also be poetry, or movie trivia. In my paintings, I either borrow the imagery and texts wholesale, or improvise.

By presenting the colorful iconography and texts within the silhouette of a drone, I hope to open up a conversation about omnipresent ‘truck art’ and the not-so-visible presence of drones in that region. ‘Truck art’ originated in Afghanistan and spread across the border into Pakistan—the same Pakistan/Afghanistan border that is now a war zone. Truck drivers use their mode of transportation as a colorful form of self-expression; drone operators, however, are invested in remaining anonymous. In nature, bright colors attract attention; in art, they also serve the practical purpose of drawing viewers into the work. And just as in nature, where certain combinations of bright colors index an animal’s deadliness, here the coded visual language, upon closer examination, reveals sinister elements such as snakes, guns, swords, spears, grenades, and dead fish, among others.

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What is the significance, if any, of tea stains on many of these works?

Tea staining has been used in traditional miniature painting for thousands of years as a way to start a painting with a neutral background instead of stark white. For these pieces, it works insofar as the texture and color of the tea stains depict well the aerial landscape of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, i.e. the view that drone operators would see on their computer monitors 10,000 kilometers away from the war zone.

As recently as a month ago, Pakistani fighter jets carried out raids on suspected militant hideouts in the tribal North Waziristan region, killing 80 militants. What do you think art can hope to achieve, against reality?

Art is not detached from reality; it is reality, often dark and violent, that impels artists to create work that may address that reality. In fact, many artists from this region have altered their artistic practice to express their concern and dissatisfaction about the bloodshed in that region. As a Pakistani living in the US, I’ve found it even more necessary to create work about issues that concern my people and me.

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Revisit the feature on Chishty and the portfolio of her work here.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

Translation Tuesday: “Priest without Judgment” by Sara Munizaga

December 9, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Sara Munizaga

Reconciling Jessica with the faith was perhaps the task God had entrusted to me in this life, the reason I had been preparing for years in silence.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present a short story by Chilean writer Sara Munizaga, translated from Spanish by the author herself. In it, a Catholic priest reflects on the frustrations of his vocation, recounting numerous examples of so-called believers whose behavior belies their professed faith. His suppressed anger conflicts with his desire to embody God’s all-encompassing forgiveness. This all comes to a head when he is asked to officiate the wedding of Jessica, a former object of infatuation who, in his telling, led him on and then cruelly rejected him. Munizaga’s story is a cynical and clever exploration of religion, gender relations, and above all, the self-deceptions that control our lives.

This vocation makes you indolent: deaths, births, and people in general cease to matter, because nothing is more demoralizing to the soul than speaking of God’s love to those who are not listening. We know they come here, to the church, as a last resort—without hope and without any genuine desire to hear the Lord’s message.

They convert to religion at the last minute, under pressure, for on their deathbeds they have no salvation plan other than the one I can give them. I feel their trembling hands clutch at my cassock, trying to keep the fate of a hell they so carelessly secured for themselves from swallowing them whole. Now they fear facing the devil when death is imminent, but when they were healthy they felt immortal and could not be bothered to live virtuously or serve others.

For that reason I spare no one in my funeral sermons. It is the only time I obtain an audience held captive by grief, and I lecture them with tedious catechism texts as a punishment for their superficial and agnostic lives. I am unmoved by the widow’s inconsolable weeping or the mourners’ emotional speeches. I know they are hypocrisy; and I will not worship any god but the God of truth, my Lord Jesus Christ. It is so simple to understand: one need only look at the life of Doña Patricia. Five children, twenty-five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and every day she arrived alone at the noon mass, accompanied only by a nurse hired by the family—who preferred to pay a stranger to take charge of the woman who gave them everything. The Christmas before last, Doña Patricia confessed to me that she had kept all her relatives’ gifts, still wrapped, there at the nursing home where she lived; her family never came to see her, and she was left alone during the holidays. And yet, a year later, at her funeral, the church was overflowing—not a single seat left empty. Then she achieved the full attendance she would have desired. I wanted to have the nerve to throw those still-wrapped gifts at their faces from the very altar, but that is not the Lord’s way. He is almighty and teaches us to find forgiveness. A greater crisis will come to that family that will rouse them from the selfish stupor in which they conduct their lives.

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More Than a Witness: A Review of The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo and Jay Boss Rubin

December 8, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Rebecca Suzuki

Across the collection, these stories are unforgiving and gut-wrenching, a reminder that reality is often the same.

The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories by Esther Karin Mngodo, translated from the Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin, Hanging Loose Press, 2025

Each story in Esther Karin Mngodo‘s short story collection, The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories, work together to compose an intricate web, with ongoing threads of entrancement cocooning readers from beginning to end. Beautifully translated from Swahili by Jay Boss Rubin, the prose grips and refuses to let go, revealing the rawest truths of the human condition.

The collection is a mixture of realism, Afrofuturism, and speculative fiction. In one of the stories, a woman and man are on a date at the theater, and one quickly realizes, in a meta turn, that the play they are watching is actually an apocalyptic story from earlier in the collection. In the middle of the play, a scream emblematizes the center of the interconnected narrative and terrifies the protagonist in the story: “I nearly went into shock. My whole body snapped to attention. I wrapped my arms around myself so I wouldn’t have to run away or hide under my seat.” Contained in this bloodcurdling scream are all the themes explored in The Witness of Nina Mvungi and Other Stories: betrayal, jealousy, negligence, violence, powerlessness, loss—feelings that so many of us suffer through alone and in silence.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

December 5, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Bethlehem Attfield and Shatha Abdellatif

The latest from Nigeria and Palestine!

In this week’s round-up of global literary news, our editors report on the winners of the Palestine Book Awards and a worrying change of policy in Nigerian language education. Read on for more.

Shatha Abdellatif, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Palestine

On November 15, the Palestine Book Awards announced this year’s winners in Central London, honouring “the spirit of Palestine” amidst a critically transformative period. Hosted by the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), the Palestine Book Awards welcomes nominations for writing on Palestine in English from publishers and authors, with no restrictions on their geographic or national backgrounds—thus worldling the literature of/on Palestine onto the global map of literary production.

Among the supremely intelligent works from this year’s winning titles was Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, making him a two-time winner of the PBA after Against Erasure took home the award in the creative category last year. Nasser Abourahme’s The Time Beneath the Concrete—an unflinching, rigorous monograph that positions refugee camps as the key to fathom the larger question of Palestine, and by extension, the spatio-temporal struggle in the larger context of Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine—won in the academic category.  Abourahme astutely writes in his introduction: “All [Palestinians] live in the permanent temporariness of camptime, with varying degrees of extraterritorial dislocation and extralegal vulnerability.” READ MORE…