Place: Mexico

The Sun and the Skeleton: A Review of Roberto Bolaño’s Posthumous Stories

February 4, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

His methodology was incompletion, digression, the refusal of closure.

Posthumous Stories by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer, Picador, 2026

When Roberto Bolaño died at age fifty of liver disease, he left behind more than fourteen thousand pages of unpublished material; in the two decades since, his posthumous career in English translation has become as prolific as his final living years were urgent. Posthumous Stories, published in Spanish as El secreto del mal in 2007 and first appearing in Chris Andrews and Natasha Wimmer’s English translation in 2012, represents neither the first nor the last excavation of those folders on his hard drive. The collection arrives with no apology, no editorial disclaimer. Some pieces may be finished. Some may not. It becomes impossible to tell.

This ambiguity extends beyond the individual stories to encompass Bolaño’s entire English-language afterlife—for Anglophone readers have almost entirely encountered him only since his death: 2666 appeared in Spanish in 2004 but reached English readers only in 2008, while The Skating Rink (2009), The Third Reich (2011), Woes of the True Policeman (2012), The Spirit of Science Fiction (2014), and Cowboy Graves (2021) all arrived in English translation years after their Spanish publication. Even The Savage Detectives—the novel that finally brought him international recognition after originally being published in 1998—only appeared in Natasha Wimmer’s translation in 2007, four years after his death. For most American and British readers, Bolaño exists exclusively as a legacy author, his work arriving piecemeal, assembled by editors and translators working from files named BAIRES and STORIX, making educated guesses about intention and completion. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2026

February 2, 2026  |  in News  |  by Hilary Ilkay, Meghan Racklin, and Xiao Yue Shan

Blog editors weigh in on our latest issue!

We are not only celebrating the release of our newest issue, the fifty-eighth under our belt, but also fifteen years of working to promote global literature! This is a jam-packed issue, with two special themes and giants in the world of translation interspersed with up-and-coming voices. There is so much to discover, and our blog editors are here to help you navigate the rich offerings on hand!

In a heartwrenching ending to a long poem, Franz Wright wondered:

. . . but
why?
Why
was I filled with such love,
when it was the law
that I be alone?

And therein lies the bind of desire, which is solitude incarnate, which demands that the object of our affections remain distant and suspended, love being most absolute when it resides in wish and conjecture. We are most in love when we hibernate within our singular conception of it, alone. The pain of the unrequited condition consoles, then, by providing us with the most vivid chimeras, pursuing the indefinite with abandon, setting up its own precipitous stakes and utmost heights, the heartening glimpses at pleasure. Such speculations lead easily into self-indulgent ecstasies, but Dino Buzzati is fluent in dreams, and as such he knows that they are only interesting if relayed by someone who sees their truths.

In the earnest and lovely “Unnecessary Invitations”, one perceives the writer who had once said that he believed “fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism”—who understands that a head in the clouds remains connected to the two feet on the ground. The story, addressed to an unnamed lover, sets up several scenarios of the wonderful things the narrator would like to do with his beloved: “to walk . . . with the sky brushed grey and last year’s old leaves still being dragged by the wind around the suburban streets”; “to cross the wide streets of the city under a November sunset”. The scenes are rose-coloured, ripe with affection—but Buzzati follows up each with a cold splash of recognition, in a brilliant switching of registers captured by translator Seán McDonagh:

Neither can you, then, love those Sundays that I mentioned, nor does your soul know how to talk to mine in silence, nor do you recognise, in exactly the right moment, the city’s spell, or the hopes that descend from the North.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2026

January 12, 2026  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Dan Shurley, Fani Avramopoulou, Hilary Ilkay, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Nicole Yurcaba, Randle Browning, and Xiao Yue Shan

New titles from China, France, Peru, Italy, Romania, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, Sweden, and Japan!

Looks like 2026 isn’t coming in slow. Despite the chaos, we’re looking forward to another year of illuminating the best of what world literature has to share—and we’re starting off with plenty to go around, with thirteen titles from ten countries. Find in the mix a new translation of one of the Peruvian canon’s most dazzling and convulsive works; a novel depicting the delicate indigenous customs of a region between Siberia and northeast China; a shocking, propulsive novella from a Japanese cult writer; a story of transformative grief from an enthralling Romanian voice, and so much more.

The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, translated from the Chinese by Bruce Humes, Milkweed Editions, 2026

Review by Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The opening lines of Chi Zijian’s wondrous novel, The Last Quarter of the Moon, set a carefully measured tone for this enchanted story of Evenki nomads: “A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them.” this rich and essential passage gently, and with deference, opens a window into a world where humans confide in rain. Chi and translator Bruce Humes indulge the word weather in at least three of its meanings, conveying the narrator’s resilience and hinting at her costly intimacy with other-than-human energies.

A word exchanging its meaning for other meanings—as if adopting different bodies to slide between existential contexts—invokes the dynamism of the shamanic Evenki cosmos, wherein earth and sky, humans and nonhumans, the embodied and the disembodied, dance together in precarious balance and tender reciprocity. Everything is alive in the Evenki’s animist multiverse, every entity ensouled, each Earthling an embodiment of the Spirits, and every human owes a debt to the Spirits for the lives of nonhumans killed for food. In turn, when a human child goes missing, in danger of freezing to death, a reindeer child must go “to the dark realm on [the human’s] behalf,” in a mimetic exchange.

READ MORE…

Graveyards as Palimpsests: A Review of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

January 5, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Darius Sobhani

The book does not merely document—it exhumes, observing death and its afterlives with a unique combination of spirituality and doubt.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enríquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Hogarth, 2025

On a visit to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in New Orleans, the narrator of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave describes a particular site: ‘Another grave has a sign that says “Crime happened here” in red, but the story, which is detailed on the lower part of the sign, is illegible, washed away by the rain.’ With this image, the Argentinian author provides the perfect analogy for her approach in this most recent non-fiction. In historical and literary terms, a palimpsest is a manuscript page—typically made of parchment—that has been scraped clean to be reused for new writing. However, the original ink often left ghostly remains—faint traces of the earlier writing bleeding through the new surface. Just as a palimpsest may contain multiple eras of writing on a single sheet, the graveyard is a site where history is simultaneously layered and scraped away by neglect. Thus for Enríquez, the graveyard is the ultimate palimpsest: a site where the past remains waiting for a sensitive traveller to decipher its remnants, akin to a medium searching for spirits.

In summary, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is a compilation of personal anecdotes that take place in specific cemeteries, with chapters set in Georgia (the state), New Orleans, Paris, and Guadalajara, among others. These places become testing grounds for the notion of graveyard as palimpsest, a methodological effect winningly achieved through Enríquez’s standout narration, which reads as equally friendly and eccentric, with a bleakly comic outlook and a fascination with the supernatural, while also tinged with a hardened scepticism. She is not any mere tourist of the morbid, but someone with a deep, almost joyful affinity, for the macabre. This odd combination of credulity and cynicism is best illustrated in the chapter detailing her visit to the cemeteries of Savannah, Georgia. During a visit to Conrad Aiken’s grave, the narrator recounts the horrific predicament of his family—how he was orphaned as a toddler after his father murdered his mother and subsequently committed suicide—but frames it within a series of casual remarks. Rather than expounding at length on the gruesome story, Enríquez mentions the grave with a peripatetic levity, recounting it amongst the perceptions of other graves that she walks by, noting: ‘Aiken’s grave isn’t the only one with a bench—Johnny Mercer also invites you to sit down.’ READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #1 Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words by Daniel Saldaña París

December 31, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

París mediates on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

It follows that our most anticipated and widely read work of 2025, tackles the most batted topic of the year: AI. Daniel Saldaña París’s “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words” (tr. Christina MacSweeney) tackles it head-on in an interesting project for Cita Press, and shares his reflections in a thought-provoking essay published in the Summer issue.

For context, Cita Press is an open access publishing project that “pairs contemporary authors and designers with public domain or open-licensed texts to create a free online library of carefully designed books by women, in Spanish and in English.” The project at hand, the “Literary Translation & Technology Project,” involves using  AI (Large Language Models, Neural Language Models, and Machine Translators), traditional translation tools, and of course, a literary translator to evaluate AI’s potential for creating open access editions of works in translation. París took on a Spanish translation of Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly. In this piece, they mediate on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

Exactly how revolutionary is this new technology in terms of our profession? Based on my one-off experience of translating Diez días en un manicomio, I can say that the benefits are limited to speeding up the translation process while not necessarily improving it.

. . .

When choosing the most appropriate translation of a particular phrase or sentence, I keep in mind the readership of the text, in addition to its social function: I don’t make the same decisions when translating for a Spanish publishing house as I would for an independent Latin American publisher, or for an open access project that will be consulted by Spanish-speakers of different origins who are unfamiliar with my version of the language. At the other extreme, when translating, I am also conscious of the historical immutability of the original: I am working with a text written in 1887 and I must retain certain usages of that context, even when this may shock our contemporary political sensibilities. 

First, París stresses the unacknowledged and unpaid labor concerning the body of work that trains AI. Given that this work is largely skewed to texts by male authors, there is an inherent gender bias in AI results. This would likely apply to translating the subtleties of minority-specific content that the software isn’t adequately trained to handle. Not to mention, were you aware that “each ChatGPT consultation uses two glasses of water?”

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2025

November 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, Liliana Torpey, and Nichole Gleisner

New work from India, Serbia, France, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Iran, Spain, Lithuania, Palestine, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This month, we’re bringing reviews of eleven different titles from eleven different regions, from a trilingual text of experimental fiction that veers between Vietnamese and English, a visceral and psychically frenetic portrait of a marriage gone wrong, a rich collection from a master Iranian poet that gestures towards his remarkable life, and the latest metafiction from a Spanish literary giant. 

dog

Dog Star by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Subha Prasad Sanyal, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Something’s rotten in the city of Kolkata. A corrupt managerial class—within which mad scientists and war-mongers play a major role—has conspired with local authorities to capture, confine, and starve as many canines as possible. While the city’s “dead serf-servants and healthful, cellphone-carrying ever-connected mummies and balloons” stagger through their dystopia, the dogs have disappeared from the urban bustle, and no one cares. Animal rights groups have been eliminated, and in the way of Nazi death camps, the system targets even newborn pups. What’s a dog to do in these last dog days? “Bark! Bark!” replies the snappy refrain of Dog Star, the lyrical, subversive, and highly re-readable novella by Bengali writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya, delivered in a kinetic English by Subha Prasad Sanyal, who has doubtlessly advanced this innovative author’s reputation in world literature.

A self-proclaimed fable, Dog Star leads the reader through dark alleys where street dogs—“nerikuttas”—hide from “pincers,” form alliances, trade information about current dangers, and strategize escape plans, looking to the constellation “Lubdhok, aka Dogstar, aka Sirius aka Alpha Canis Majoris” for liberation. These survivors, along with their unlikely feline allies, are anthropomorphized in their emotions and dialogues, and their plight, although set in West Bengal, is familiar enough to seem representative of any place under political (dis)order. The Netanyahu regime’s genocide against Gaza comes to mind, for example, as do the active “detention centers” in the US: “They’ll yank and drag you by your neck with the pincers to the caged car. Then throw you in.” Bhattacharya does not avoid visceral descriptions of animal torture, but he balances its brutality with astute irony, giving the murderers absurd lines like: “We must pay heed that there aren’t ridiculous expenses.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Scorpion in February” by Guillermo Fadanelli

November 4, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Helena Dunsmoor

Further knocking ensues, irritable and unseemly. I’ve been tempted to answer with barks, but I’m no good at imitating animals.

Who’s waiting on the other side of the door? In this week’s Translation Tuesday offering, a darkly comic short story by Mexican author Guillermo Fadanelli, the anxiety of being seen overwhelms our narrator—even when there’s no one else around. It’s for that reason that the threshold, the thin barrier between inside and outside, becomes a sacred space, protecting his tranquil sanctum. From a safe distance, he surveys his surroundings with a mixture of fear and curiosity. But when a neighbor comes calling, he must cross that boundary and confront the bewildering, savage world outside. Translated from the Spanish by Helena Dunsmoor, this story examines what it costs to exist alongside others.

When some person comes to my house and knocks on the door with their knuckles, my heart suffers a strange tremor. Suddenly paralyzed, I can’t move at all or answer out loud that yes, I’m in here hearing your knocking. Then I start thinking about the possibility of opening the door to find out who’s on the other side waiting for a reply, at least. I’d love to own a dog whose bark would let intruders know that things aren’t so easy in here. But the gaze of dogs is unbearable, and it would be hard getting used to looking him in the eye every day. So many times in my life I’ve had to call something off just because a damned animal is watching me.

Yesterday, while I was writing a letter to the director of a charity, three blows—flat, dry, free of reverberations—slammed against my apartment door. I tensed up right away. My spine lost its usual curvature and my fingers curled like seashells. I always nurse the hope it will be a mistake. The individual standing just feet away, separated from my person by nothing more than a thin wall, looks up to confirm the error. The metal figure on the door is quite clearly the number 5. It could look like an S, but I truly doubt anyone would come into this building looking for an S. Things never go that way. Instead, further knocking ensues, irritable and unseemly. I’ve been tempted to answer with barks, but I’m no good at imitating animals. When I was a boy I could moo like a cow, bleat and even trumpet, but those days are gone.

READ MORE…

Stone that Treads on Stone: An Interview with Irizelma Robles and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera on Poetry as Alchemy

October 22, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Myths give us some rituals, some explanations for life, ways of acting in this life.

Awarded the Pedro Lastra International Poetry Prize by the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2019, Puerto Rican poet and essayist Irizelma Robles percolates ritualist practise, alchemy, and the occult into her scholarship and poetry. Her fourth poetry collection, El libro de los conjuros (Editorial Folium, 2018), embodies this fusion. The text has been translated into English by Puerto Rican poet and translator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera as The Book of Conjurations and was published by Sundial House last June 2024. In this spell book, Dr Robles writes about how “water will make way for the earth / that will listen” and “pieces of language / erased like mist,” summoning skies, substance, soul, and source. In his translator’s note, Dr Salas frames poetry as alchemy: “transmutation through words . . . transform[ing] poet, reader, and language.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Robles (in New York) and Dr Salas (in Puerto Rico), on El libro de los conjuros / The Book of Conjurations and the mutability of poetry through the lens of alchemy.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Irizelma, your remarkable poetry collection from 2018, El libro de los conjuros, is now out in Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s translation as The Book of Conjurations. Taking us back to that period and before, what were the creative impulses and poetic foundations that shaped this work?

Irizelma Robles (IR): Ten years before it was El libro de los conjuros, its title was La tabla periódica (The Periodic Table) and when I began writing it in 2016, it was titled El libro de la Santa Muerte (The Book of the Santa Muerte). I did fieldwork in the Huaxteca region of Veracruz and Hidalgo during my student years under the direction of my anthropology professor, Ana Bella Pérez Castro. It was during that period that I came across El libro de la Santa Muerte, a book of conjurations and spells. Later, in conversation with Eugenio Ballou, my friend and editor, we discovered that its true title was El libro de los conjuros.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 19, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Veronica Gisondi

The latest from the Philippines, Italy, and Mexico!

This week, our editors report on a workshop centred around disaster writing in Mexico City; a literary festival with themes of urbanism, gentrification, personal history, and war narratives in Milan; and the passing of two groundbreaking translators in the Philippines. 

René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Mexico

I used to live with my mother in a small apartment in the eastern part of Mexico City. One day, my bed suddenly shook. I attributed it to a passing truck—but the movement started to feel suspiciously long and, when I realized what was happening, I grabbed Cookie, my dog, and ran out of the building. That day was September 19, 2017, when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake shook central Mexico, taking the lives of more than three hundred and sixty people, affecting over thirty thousand; it caused the collapse of thirty-eight buildings in the city, and damaged more than twelve thousand. Strangely enough, the earthquake struck on the same date as another historical quake in Mexico City thirty-two years prior, and, worse still, just a few hours after the ceremony commemorating the thousands who had died back then.

Writing from disaster is strange: it is an exercise in personal memory, in archiving, a hybrid between literature and journalism. What matters are the hours, the clothes you were wearing, what people told you, what you held in your hands. And precisely because this year marks forty years since the 1985 earthquake and eight since that of 2017, the Institute of Geophysics and Literatura UNAM—both institutions of the National Autonomous University of Mexico—have organized the workshop Zona de riesgo (“Risk Zone”), which seeks to recover, through creative writing and sound production, the collective memory of two of the most significant events in the country’s recent history. READ MORE…

“An End of the World with More Movement and Fewer Screens”: An Interview with Daniel Saldaña París

September 3, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

[I]f there is meaning and order, it’s not individually accessible—it can only be found in love and friendship.

Daniel Saldaña París’s novel, The Dance and the Fire, recently published in Christina MacSweeney’s translation, is a sophisticated tour-de-force centering the ungovernable forces that nourish, propel, and destroy us. In it, three estranged childhood friends are reunited as wildfires close in on the city of Cuernavaca. Besieged by inexorable change and irretrievable intimacies, the trio narrates a carnivalesque Armageddon woven from dance plagues, religious fanaticism, and natural disaster. París’s cerebral, compassionate prose encompasses a vast range of lived experiences, including the domestic, the uncanny, and the beautifully flawed. 

The Dance and the Fire is a journey through the past and the present, heading into the unspeakable core of being human. As a fan of both his earlier essay collection, Planes Flying Over a Monster (also translated by MacSweeney), and this most recent work, I was thrilled to be able to speak with Saldaña París about his writing, its major themes, and inspirations in this interview.

Sofija Popovska (SP): In Planes Flying Over a Monster, you weave personal memories together with an eclectic mix of historical anecdotes. Natalia, the first narrator in The Dance and the Fire, seems to share your archival bent, and so does the father of the third narrator, Conejo. It looks like they process how they feel about where they are at the moment by engaging with stories from the past. What does this “historian’s compulsion” mean to you?

Daniel Saldaña Paris (DSP): It’s the way I experience places. I’m in New York City right now, for example, and when I walk these streets, I always remember that the first non-native inhabitant of Manhattan was a Black man from Santo Domingo who spoke Spanish and arrived with Dutch merchants. That detail reminds me how deeply my language is interwoven with this city, and it changes how I see the place. Archives are not dead tools; they’re the original augmented reality glasses.

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…

Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

August 4, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Our bountiful Summer 2025 edition is filled with gems—as these highlights from our team show!

I have complicated feelings about Carolina Brown’s “Anthropocene” (tr. Jessica Powell). The brevity it accords its narrator’s transness is alternately touching and maddening, the fatphobia is at once completely spot-on for such a self-loathing narrator and at the same time it is pretty dehumanizing‚ but, ultimately, all that falls away in the ravaged face of a one-armed zombie jogging across the post climate-change Antarctic wasteland. A wonderful sci-fi tale.

I’d love Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of an Ocean (tr. Darryl Sterk) for the title alone, but fortunately, Rapongan seems like a strong contender for the title of the actual most-interesting-man-in-the-world. His play with words, his treatment of colonization and indigeneity, the kindness with which he talks about younger generations. I really needed to read something like this, after all the ugliness that’s been going on in my own country.

I love the gender-bender secret agent in Valentinas Klimašauskas’s Polygon (tr. Erika Lastovskytė) so freaking much. The concluding discussion of airplane spotters is a particular stand-out for its treatment of how individuals become conscious of their political power.

Refugees are human beings. Where Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’ “La Venezolana” (tr. Shaina Brassard) shines is in its steadfast refusal either to vilify or idealize them, to present them in all their messy humanity, and in its willingness to show how shameful the narrator’s behavior towards them.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Emmanuelle Sapin’s story “A Child Is Stolen” (tr. Michelle Kiefer) starts off with a swift, telling punch to the gut and builds from there.

Ahmad Shamlou’s poems in Niloufar Talebi’s lilting translation hover in waves of emotion and radiance: “Give me mirrors and eager moths, / light and wine…”

With playfulness and insight, Katia Grubisic sharpens the discussion about AI and translation by focusing on error in her piece “The Authority of Error”: “My argument is that AI makes the wrong kind of mistakes.  Mistakes breed resilience, and, most importantly, humility.”

Fawwaz Taboulsi, in Yasmine Zohdi’s translation, steers us directly into the sadness of Lebanon, 1982, and the time of the Siege of Beirut. His grief speaks with lucidity: “And, ever so slowly, the departing fighters peel away from the grasping, waving hands and from the embracing arms. Like skin peeling off its own flesh. They peel away from the farewells. From the prayers. From the promises.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers build characters. Jana Putrle Srdić’s poem “End of the world, beginning” in Katia Zakrajšek’s translation, does this in striking ways: ” Sitting on a warm rock, scratching in the wind, / you are a monkey, a branch with ants filing along it, debris in the air, / spots of flickering light”

—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 1, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Charlie Ng, Linnea Gradin, and René Esaú Sánchez

The latest literary news from Hong Kong, Sweden, and Mexico!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us updates on book fairs, industry trends, and tk. From the impact of censorship on book fairs in Hong Kong, to the domination of Scandi-noir in Sweden, to a celebration of a beloved publishing house in Mexico, read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong

The 35th Hong Kong Book Fair took place from July 16 to July 22, at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai. This year’s theme, “Food Culture.Future Living,” aimed to explore culinary traditions and histories, connecting food cultures and lifestyles. As part of the event, the “Theme of the Year Seminar Series” featured a variety of sessions with authors and speakers dedicated to discussing food cultures from various perspectives. Topics included the historical significance of culinary traditions, the link between nutrition and health, and future trends in food consumption. Despite its rich programming, the fair experienced a notable decline in visitor numbers, with attendance dropping approximately 10% from the previous year. Organizers from the Hong Kong Trade Development Council reported that around 890,000 visitors participated, down from 990,000 in 2024. This decline followed the disruption caused by Typhoon Wipha, which forced the fair to suspend activities for an entire day. Some exhibitors expressed dissatisfaction with the situation as there was a significant drop in sales attributed to the typhoon’s impact on the peak business day.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong literary group the House of Hong Kong Literature announced the cancellation of its own book fair, originally scheduled for July 18-27. The non-profit organization expressed regret for the abrupt decision, which stemmed from unspecified reasons that were beyond the organizer’s control. Co-founder Tang Siu-wa mentioned that the cancellation affected their fundraising efforts, especially as profits were intended to support their relocation. In recent years, independent publishers and bookstores in Hong Kong have increasingly organized alternative book fairs to counter perceived censorship by the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. The HKTDC had explicitly rejected applications to join Hong Kong Book Fair from publishers that published books on pro-democracy movements or asked exhibitors to remove sensitive titles from their shelves. Moreover, the “Reading Everywhere” independent book fair co-hosted at Hunter Bookstore, located in Sham Shui Po, faced scrutiny from the pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po, which alleged that the event fostered “soft resistance” against the government. The bookstore’s director, Leticia Wong, defended the fair, stating that the selection of books focused on local authors and was not intended to conceal any titles. Some other businesses in the same district were also accused of “soft resistance,” including a pen shop that sold ballpoint pens featuring local-concept designs, which won an award in 2019, and a café with graffiti of a frog on the wall, interpreted as Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that gained symbolic meaning as a pro-democracy icon during the 2019 protests. READ MORE…