Posts filed under 'Other Press'

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 13, 2024  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy, Miranda Mazariegos, and Wambua Muindi

The latest from Kenya, Egypt, and Mexico!

In this edition of our column for global literary news, Arabic titles are celebrated with the National Book Award’s longlist of Translated Literature, a vital literacy program in Kenya travels to a women’s prison, and a new cinematic adaptation of one of Mexico’s most important novels premiers at the Toronto International Film Festival. Read on to find out more!

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt

Against the backdrop of the war in Gaza, literature emerges as a beacon of hope. Now translated into English, three Arabic literary works have been longlisted for the prestigious National Book Award for Translated Literature, standing as testaments to the resilience of the human spirit. Nasser Abu Srour’s The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poignant memoir recounting his decades-long imprisonment in Israeli jails. Through the lens of his imagination, Abu Srour transforms confinement into a realm of boundless possibility, exploring themes of love, justice, and the unwavering power of hope. The book’s evocative prose and its author’s unflinching honesty combine into a compelling narrative that has resonated with readers around the globe; interested readers can also see an excerpt published on Asymptote as a part of our All Eyes on Palestine column.

Additionally, Leri Price, a frequent contender for the National Book Award, has once again made the longlist with her translation of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home (which Asymptote had selected for the February edition of our Book Club). This haunting novel delves into the complexities of human relationships and the devastating impact of war on individuals and communities. Another longlisted work is Bothayna al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, co-translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain. This thought-provoking novel examines the censorship of literature and its profound implications for society. I’m so glad that Arabic literature is shining thanks to the fabulous work of its translators. READ MORE…

To Exist At All: On Nasser Abu Srour’s Prison Memoir

August 26, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Hanson

. . . Abu Srour exercises a poet’s iteration of prose, gliding towards the mystic wonders of his undivided, individual experience.

The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on the Meaning of Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, Other Press, 2024

In his opening note to the readers of his prison memoir, The Tale of a Wall, Palestinian poet Nasser Abu Srour wishes a “rugged time” to those who are heading into his scintillating prose, a terrain which is also interspersed with charged moments of verse. Indicating that its author is a romantic at heart, this philosophical and nihilist work of mental abstraction was inspired by the “womb of a concrete wall” that has held Abu Srour since 1993, when he was given a life sentence at the age of twenty-three for being an alleged accomplice in the murder of a Shin Bet intelligence officer.

As literature, The Tale of a Wall is a visceral, Dionysian feast of words, lain with a delicate hand. Fired by righteous indignation and howling with a disembodied eccentricity, Palestinian self-determination is here distilled into a single voice, tortured within the echo chambers of a confession table and the paper cuts of intellectualism, finishing with a full course of epistolary melodrama. The memoir itself is cleaved in two, with the first half dedicated to letting go, to saying farewell to the world after his incarceration in Hebron Prison in the last year of the First Intifada. The latter portion is devoted to his relationship with a woman named Nanna, a diaspora Palestinian who returns to her ancestral homeland to capture his heart with a power rivalling that of Israel’s occupying force.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 25, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Eva Wissting, MARGENTO, and Rubén López

The latest in world literature from Sweden, Guatemala, and Ireland!

This week, Asymptote‘s Editors-at-Large take us around the global literary scene, featuring book fairs and the highlights of Women in Translation Month! From the multimedia cultural event Bokmässan by Night in Sweden to the Taiwan/Ireland Poetry Translation Competition, read on to learn more!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

A month from today, it will be time for Scandinavia’s largest literary event, the Göteborg Book Fair—an event spanning four days with around eight hundred exhibitors and the same amount of seminar speakers. Started in 1985, it now attracts eighty-five thousand writers, publishers, librarians, teachers, and book lovers every year. This year’s themes are Jewish Culture, The City, and Audio. The club concept Bokmässan by Night was introduced last year, which combines bar hopping with various cultural experiences. The fair has now announced that Bokmässan by Night will return on September 29 with four stages, five bars, multiple DJs, and stage performances. The evening includes Swedish writers and dramatists Jonas Hassen Khemiri—known to Asymptote readers through pieces like I Call My Brothers and Only in New York—and Agneta Pleijel, whose novel A Fortune Foretold was published in Marlaine Delargy’s English translation by Other Press in 2017. Bokmässan by Night will also offer live literary criticism with critics Mikaela Blomqvist, Jesper Högström and Valerie Kyeyune Backström, as well as live podcasts, including Flora Wiström’s Röda rummet—a literary podcast which borrows its name from the Swedish Modernist writer and playwright August Strindberg’s 1879 debut novel The Red Room. While Bokmässan by Night is an in-person experience, many other events during the fair are available online through Book Fair Play. 

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What Exists Where You Do Not See: On Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche

March 16, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Arabella Bosworth

Bariloche is bleakly luminous and fascinatingly fractured.

Bariloche by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Open Letter, 2023

Andrés Neuman’s first novel, originally published in 1999, is his fourth to be translated into English—following Traveller of the Century, Talking to Ourselves, and Fracture. Any thoughts of difficulty or inadequacy suggested by this twenty-odd-year delay can be quickly dismissed: it is worth the wait. Finalist in the Herralde Prize, and described by Bolaño as containing something “that can be found only in great literature, the kind written by real poets,” this story of a trash collector living in Buenos Aires who obsessively compiles puzzles depicting the region of his childhood—the Bariloche of the title—is densely powerful.

The narrative follows Demetrio as he goes about his job collecting trash with his co-worker, El Negro. They work while the city (or most of it) sleeps, stopping only to breakfast on cafe con leche and medialunas, occasionally inviting a homeless person to join them. Their dialogue is simple, and El Negro talks far more than Demetrio, who is absorbed in thought—or in nothingness, El Negro can’t tell. After work, in the early afternoon, Demetrio returns home, where he collapses into bed, finding a kind of brief relief there:

He went to the bathroom, pissed with relish, took off his shoes, stroked his pillow, breathed between the sheets, the sheets were dissolving into something else becoming water, becoming waves.

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When Meaning Fails Us: A Review of A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique

February 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Language is not only adjacent to violence in this novel, but comes to physically embody it . . .

A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, Other Press, 2023

March of 2023 will bring A Sun to be Sewn, a novel by Haitian poet, playwright, and novelist Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, to bookshelves around the world. D’Amérique explores ravaged landscapes of the city and the heart, delves deep into wounds collective and individual, and parses fragments of hope shored against the ruin of a land ravaged by violence and destitution. Recounting the story of a young Haitian girl fleeing from a cruel prophecy and into the arms of her beloved, treading a path that weaves amidst the dangers of her Port-au-Prince slum, D’Amérique unfolds a panorama of pain and courage, death and desire, telling all in a wounded lyrical style that haunts the reader long after the novel’s end.

A Sun to be Sewn is narrated by a talented young girl, known to the reader as Cracked Head, living in a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her mother, Orange Blossom, is a prostitute struggling with alcohol addiction, “drowning,” as Cracked Head puts it, “to draw her halo from the abyss.” Her adoptive father, Papa, makes money from various criminal activities, working for a cruel and powerful man known as the Angel of Metal. Cracked Head is no stranger to crime herself, as it provides for survival which would otherwise be impossible. Even so, she lives off of “bread and sweetened water,” anchoring her hope in the image of her beloved: Silence, the daughter of her teacher.
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Memory as Political: On Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

January 18, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Shehadeh treats this memoir as an evocative paean towards a landscape that can never be recovered.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh, Other Press, 2023

In Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (2012), Norbert Bugeja defines the memoirist as operating “within that representational chasm . . . in which the memoirist’s chosen interpretation of a space or preferred schema of memory come to be reconfigured against the received facts of traditional ideological geographies and vice-versa.” In the harrowing We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir, Raja Shehadeh shows he is no exemption to this friction between fact and memory. A Ramallah-based human rights lawyer with several acclaimed memoirs (one received the 2008 Orwell Prize; another was adapted into a stage play) and scholarly essays (covering topics from international law to theatre criticism) to his name, Shehadeh is a cosmopolitan, peripatetic writer and addresses the topic of his personal history and homeland with wide-ranging expertise. According to Jonathan Cook in Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008), Shehadeh “is perhaps the most knowledgeable critic of Israel’s labyrinth of legislation in the occupied territories.” In addition to enacting activism through his writing, he also founded al-Haq in the 1970s—a Palestinian organization at the frontlines in peace negotiations and in providing legal aid to Palestinians.

In We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, his eleventh book of non-fiction, Shehadeh foregrounds the Nakba—the catastrophic aftermath of the 1948 Palestinian war. But a better appreciation of his works necessarily invites a discussion on the milieu of where he is writing from—both ethnopolitically and aesthetically. Ethnopolitically, the memoir centres the land dispossession, drone warfare, and strategic erasure of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military government—as well as the treacheries committed by Palestine’s former coloniser, the Ingleez, Britain, and even neighbouring nations like Jordan and the League of Arab States. Aesthetically, on the other hand, the writing evokes other articles of “resistance literature,” such as those concerning Partition or occupation, as well as the larger body of Arab political essays and political memoirs that permeates Shehadeh’s œuvre: his powerful storytelling emanates from the kind of clearsighted prose afforded by forthright reportage.

Conor McCarthy favourably compared Shehadeh to Edward Said as being “more directly political,” evidently a departure from show don’t tell (a hackneyed chestnut propagated by workshop cultism because there should be, in descriptive writing, room to explain, to tell). Shehadeh takes advantage of the power in exposition even as he plays with form; the narration and the way the chapters are organised as somewhat non-linear and non-chronological, jumping from one particular time and place to another, but remain always guided by both reminiscence and research. READ MORE…

Meeting in Positano: The Late Modernist Fiction of Goliarda Sapienza

June 9, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Hanson

The novel is easy to read, but it is not an easy read.

Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore, Other Press, 2021

Meeting in Positano was the very last novel that Goliarda Sapienza wrote before she fell to her death in 1996 at her home in Gaeta. Frustrated by many failed attempts to publish her writing throughout her life, Sapienza’s ultimate book was fraught with the existentialist neuroses of modernism as she searched for ways through and out of its sprawling, vicious embrace. Between its fragile subjectivity and ambivalent subject, Meeting in Positano traces the psychology of its protagonist, caught between film production in the Italian capital and the pacifying lure of the titular out-of-the-way town—wherein a fading daughter of the old aristocracy has also come to shed her qualms with the pace, pressure, and emptiness of materialism, money, and men.

The daughter of Sicilian socialists—who, among many plaudits, published Antonio Gramsci—Sapienza lived along that drift in which sensitive artists become hardened intellectuals before succumbing to outright revolution. Despite the environment of ardent intellectualism, the wayward, postwar Sapienza children were afloat in an Italy which resembled a rudderless raft in the Mediterranean—a country that had gone slack in its attempted confrontation of the country’s unresolved tendencies to fascism. In its quest for spiritual emigration, the literary work of Goliarda Sapienza details the inner lives of her fellow Italians, challenged by the trials of collective renewal following years of unspeakable despair during and after the years of World War II—even if the traces of those years are only seen, or merely felt, after the fact.

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