The Fall issue of Asymptote, “Transfigurations,” is now live. Our nets cast wide, we showcase never-before-published work by some of the most beloved figures working in world literature: Jon Fosse, Osama Alomar, Breyten Breytenbach, and Margaret Jull Costa. In our Catalan Fiction Special Feature, we present celebrated writers J. V. Foix, Cèlia Suñol, and Manuel Baixauli alongside emerging voices that represent the future of Catalan literature: Najat El Hachmi, Marta Rojals, and Neus Canyelles.

This edition’s many protean forms are deftly fixed in photography by New York-based guest artist Olaya Barr. In Korean playwright Sam-Shik Pai’s hilarious drama, the narrator morphs mid-sentence into a hairy beast while in Mexican author José Revueltas’s hypnotic fiction, apes turn into people then back into apes again. Hong Kong visual artist Chan Sai-lok and his Brazilian counterpart Guga Szabzon both transform writing into image into word. In a generous interview, Phillip Lopate reflects on the metamorphic affective life of the essayist.

Nguyễn Đức Tùng’s moving account of memory loss in exile opens a powerful nonfiction section that bears witness to a swiftly changing world. In this issue’s poetry, George Prevedourakis adapts Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” into his own vision of contemporary Greece while Elvira Hernández weaves fragments of the story of Chile into her vision of the Chilean flag, swelling up “like an ulcerated belly.” READ MORE…