Summer News from Asymptote

August 28, 2014 | in News | by Eva Richter

Plays, data maps, video projects, and book reviews from Asymptote's team of editors and contributors!

Remember Isle-to-Isle? Chief executive assistant Berny Tan and Sher Chew’s collaborative data visualization and experimental reading project based on Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island? (Now say that three times fast!). Well, the yearlong project is going strong, and the two collaborators reflected on their first five weeks with Mr. Verne in the Parsons Journal for Information Mapping. In this fascinating read, they delve into the trials of imagining the novel in map and diagram form.

For all you D.C. and Austin theatergoers: drama editor Caridad Svich’s Spark will receive its world premiere at theTheater Alliance, Anacostia Playhouse, on September 4–28, 2014, in Washington, D.C., under Colin Hovde’s direction. Likewise, her play Guapa will be produced at the Austin Community College-Rio Grande Campus on September 25–October 5, 2014 in Austin, TX, under Tomas Salas’s direction.

The Latest from Asymptote’s Contributors and Editors

June 26, 2014 | in News | by Eva Richter

It's that time: essays, interviews, stories, and poems from those who make Asymptote happen

Aditi Machado, Asymptote poetry editor, saw her poems appear in the April issue of MiPOesias and the new issue of Transom. To read her poetry is a pleasure; to hear it a delight – so check out a video of her reading at Counterpath, Denver.

Asymptote’s chief executive assistant Berny Tan and Sher Chew launched Isle-to-Isle, a collaborative data visualization and experimental reading project based on Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Pictured above, it’s a yearlong project with weekly updates – an exciting endeavor that will ultimately become “a mammoth illustration of Verne’s adventure classic.”

Is foreignness an inherently fertile imaginative/observational state for you? contributor Brittani Sonnenberg asks in an interview-essay published in The Millions. Deeply related to notions of diaspora raised in Asymptote’s April 2014 issue, the interview is in depth and worth reading. To her question, past contributor Jeremy Tiang answers that he thrives on dislocation, so maybe now is the time to take that trip you’ve been putting off (it’s for your writing, after all).

Spring with Asymptote: New books, essays, poems, and more!

May 28, 2014 | in News | by Eva Richter

May's contributor news roundup ends the month right

This Memorial Day weekend, Alex Cigale saw two of his poems on Americana published in Amherst College’s The Common. His translations of Buryat Russian poet Amarsana Ulzytuev are in the “Eco Literature” feature in the current World Literature Today (May 2014), and his in-depth interview with poet-translator Phil Metres appears in The Conversant.

Do you know what it’s like / when a ghost licks your intestines / Do you know what it’s like / when a rat devours your brain—thus ponders Daniel Borzutzky in his disquieting recent poem, “Dream Song #17.” Read it today at the Poetry Foundation; you won’t regret it.

Asymptote interviewee David Mitchell’s most recent novel, The Bone Clocks, is forthcoming in September from Random House, and reviewers are already abuzz. “Is The Bone Clocks the most ambitious novel ever written, or just the most Mitchell-esque?” Publisher’s Weekly wonders. From the plot summary that follows, could it be… both?