Posts featuring Agustina Bazterrica

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

December 15, 2023  |  in Dispatches, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas and Ibrahim Sayed Fawzy Elsayed

The latest literary news from Bulgaria and Egypt!

This week, our editors-at-large report from Bulgaria and Egypt, taking us to book fairs and prize ceremonies. From the passing of a giant of Egyptian children’s literature to the arrival of literary stars in Bulgaria, read on to find out more!

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the Sofia International Book Fair graced the beginning of December. It took place over five days in the National Palace of Culture and saw the participation of approximately 160 publishing houses. Its motto was, quite fittingly, “We create stories. We create history.”

In an interview for the Nova News channel, Veselin Todorov, former longtime chairman of the Bulgarian Book Association revealed some intriguing details about the fair’s conception: “We began this tradition fifty-five years ago. However, we are celebrating our golden jubilee only now because on several occasions during socialist times, it was decided for the fair to be held every other year instead of every year. It all started back in 1968, in the Universiada Hall. Todor Zhivkov [former de facto leader of Bulgaria] inaugurated the event—a pompous and noisy affair. He even claimed it was one of the biggest such fairs in Eastern Europe.”

Literary critic Amelia Licheva also commented on the festival in her opening-day interview for the independent media platform Toest: “The boldest ambition of the team in charge of the cultural program (both Daria Karapetkova and I are part of it this year) is to attract real stars. Bulgaria is a small market with a bad image abroad and it is rather difficult, but we do not give up easily. Actually, our efforts finally paid off. The Bulgarian public will be able to meet with Franco Moretti, Leïla Slimani, Dacia Maraini, Stefan Hertmans, Ia Genberg, and Agustina Bazterrica. We are hoping to cultivate a taste in the audience for the issues of global importance and get more people to attend these discussions. This would mean a success not only for the festival but also for the role of literature in the present day.”

What better way to end 2023 than with hope for the literary future of 2024?

Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Egypt READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2023

May 15, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal, Matthew Redman, and Rubén López

New translations from the Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese!

This month, our editors feature three titles that showcase what’s possible when a writer fully showcases a firm and brilliant insight into their reality. From a collection of short stories that investigate the violence of Latin American society, to a multifaceted depiction of colonial Mozambique, to essays that focus on the intimate dailyness of human lives in twentieth-century China, these works educate, provoke, and enthrall. Read on to find out more!

ampuero

Human Sacrifices by María Fernanda Ampuero, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle, The Feminist Press, 2023

Review by Rubén Lopez, Editor-at-Large for Central America

In Human Sacrifices, a collection of short stories, María Fernanda Ampuero traces the deterioration of individuals who have survived an overwhelmingly violent reality. With guts, blood, and a dense anger, she escorts us to a precipice with each story, strips us naked, and delivers us to a place where the wounds of Latin American are made real, and thus can be dissected. Published by Editorial Páginas de Espuma in 2021 and now appearing in English translation by Frances Riddle, the collection contains twelve stories that question our reality as one occasionally resembling more a traitorous deception.

The stories in Human Sacrifices are profoundly Latin American, but more specifically, they describe the experience of vulnerable Latin American women: a unique kind of hell. Gendered violence is present in almost all the narratives—a bone that vertebrates the monster: “Desperate women,” states one of the protagonists, “serve as meat for the grinder. Immigrant women are bones to be pulverized into animal fodder.” The opening story, “Biography,” is perhaps the most intimate, narrating in first person the terror of being a migrant woman in a foreign country. The narrative implants the dehumanizing panic of crossing invisible borders in pursuit of a less harsh horizon, as well as the fear of becoming an anonymous number, a disappeared woman, a name written on a wall. As the narrator states: “I remember someone once told me that the stars we see have been dead for a long time, and I think that maybe the disappeared women might also shine on like that, with that same blinding light, making it easier to find them.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 25, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Carol Khoury, and Eva Wissting

At home or not, travel the world with the latest in literary news.

This week, our editors from Argentina, Sweden, and Palestine have plenty to report. In Argentina, readers have paid homage to writer Rodolfo Fogwill on the tenth anniversary of his death, and a new imprint has been translating classics of Argentine noir into Greek; in Sweden, the annual Göteborg Book Fair is taking place online; and in Palestine, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail has been nominated for a US National Book Award, whilst a new exhibition at the Palestinian museum has hosted a series of authors, including Mahmoud Shukair. Read on to find out more!

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Ten years ago, Argentina’s literary world was stunned at the news of Rodolfo Fogwill’s death. The writer, whom The Guardian called “loud-mouthed, provocative, and downright rude,” loomed large in Argentine letters, by dint of both his literary accomplishments and outsize personality. (His anti-war novel Malvinas Requiem was written in one cocaine- and whiskey-fueled week, and remains the only novel of his translated into English.) Last month, the country commemorated the decade since Fogwill’s death with a slew of virtual tributes: The National Library of Argentina’s YouTube channel featured a playlist of interviews and other audiovisual artifacts of his career; his publisher, Alfaguara, hosted Fogwill Week on their social media channels; and readers and writers paid homage to a writer whose works have remade the literary landscape. The enfant terrible lives on.

In Greece, classics of Argentine noir are finding new life with Carnívora, a new imprint dedicated to translating and publishing Latin American crime fiction in Greek. “In Argentina, literary talent abounds, and we could say that the reading public in Greece has had a kind of literary love for Argentina since the Latin American boom,” Carnívora editor and translator Aspasía Kampyli told La Nación this week. “That’s why it’s no coincidence that the first two writers we published, Guillermo Orsi and Raúl Argemí, have been Argentine, and the reception from critics and Greek readers has been especially warm.” In less than a year since its launch, the imprint has also won design awards for its logo and book covers. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but Carnívora’s positive coverage bodes well for Latin American noir in Greece.

More recent works are also getting buzz in foreign markets. Asymptote’s own Sarah Moses translated Agustina Bazterrica’s novel about a cannibalistic future for the human race, Tender Is the Flesh, for Pushkin Press (UK) and the Scribner (US). The book, recently reviewed in The New York Times, is available now in the US. Though it’s not traditional noir, Bazterrica’s book seems to fit Carnívora’s description of the genre: “crimes wrought by history or tragedy.” Perhaps we’ll soon see the novel in Greek. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

August 28, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Eva Wissting, Kwan Ann, and Shawn Hoo

This week’s literary news from Singapore, Argentina, Sweden, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you the latest news from Singapore, Argentina, Sweden, and Malaysia. In Singapore, the shortlist for the Singapore Literature Prize was announced; in Argentina, the Asociación Argentina de Traductores e Intérpretes has been celebrating National Translation month with a series of talks; in Sweden, the annual crime fiction festival Crimetime has begun; and in Malaysia, Erica Eng became the first Malaysian winner of the Eisner Award. Read on to find out more!

Shawn Hoo, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Singapore

Singapore’s premier literary award, the biennial Singapore Literature Prize, held a virtual awards ceremony for the first time last night, and handed out prizes across the nation’s four official languages (Malay, Tamil, Mandarin, and English). Notably, Marylyn Tan made history with her queer and transgressive poetry collection, GAZE BACK, when she became the first woman (and lesbian) writer to win the top prize for Poetry in English. Other big winners include Wong Koi Tet (published by City Book Room) and Sithuraj Ponraj, who walked away with two prizes each. Evidently, the arts have continued to feel the negative repercussions of the pandemic, as the top prize money was slashed from SGD$10,000 to SGD$3,000 this year due to a lack of funding.

Prior to the ceremony, Unggun Creative’s Jamal Ismail—who won the Merit Award for his novel Tunjuk Langit (Pointing the Sky)—had bemoaned the lesser prize money, but wondered if winners could alternatively be awarded the “translation of their works into other languages.” Literary translations across languages in Singapore remain an under-tapped potential.

Hearty congratulations to previous Asymptote contributors who made the shortlist: Hamid Roslan, for his inventive and cacophonous bilingual collection of poetry, parsetreeforestfire; and Amanda Lee Koe, for Delayed Rays of a Star, a novel that unfolds an ambitiously transnational history through the lives of cinema icons Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich, and Leni Riefenstahl.

In other prize-related news, the Epigram Books Fiction Prize—formerly reserved for Singaporean writers—was for the first time this year open to submissions from Southeast Asia. This year’s winning novel, How the Man in Green Saved Pahang, and Possibly the World, is written by Kuala Lumpur-born Joshua Kam and has just been released. Pre-orders are underway for the books by the other finalists who hail from across the region. With the emphasis on regional submissions continued for next year, the Singapore-based prize looks set to become an important institution shaping the regional English-language publication scene.

Finally, an online symposium held on August 12 explored the role of the anthology in Singapore’s literary ecosystem, and put the nation’s feast of anthologies into focus. In fact, the latest anthology to arrive just this month, Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet (eds. Ann Ang, Daryl Lim Wei Jie, and Tse Hao Guang), describes itself as a literal feast: “a buffet, a banquet, an omakase, a smorgasbord, a nasi padang spread, a thali or a rijsttafel.”

READ MORE…

What’s New with the Crew? (August 2020)

August 6, 2020  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what the Asymptote staff have been up to this quarter!

Contributing Editor Adrian Nathan West recently reviewed Darius James’s Negrophobia: An Urban Parable for Review31. His translation of Rainald Goetz’s Rave was also released by Fitzcarraldo Editions last month.

Contributing Editor Ellen Elias-Bursać and past contributor Paula Gordon recently translated Olja Knežević’s Catherine the Great and the Small (out with Istros Books). To find out more, read Matt Janney’s review of the first novel from Montenegrin by a female writer to come out in English translation.

Assistant Director of the Educational Arm Kent Kosack has a new craft essay on Lauren Groff’s short story “Ghosts and Empties” up at Fiction Writers Review and a short story, “Kulshi Bekhir,” out at Hobart.

After presenting a hypermedia performance at DHSI 2020, MARGENTO, editor-at-large for Romania and Moldova, collaborated with Diana Inkpen, Vaibhav Kesarwani, and Prasadith Kirinde Gamaarachchige on an article in Digital Humanities Benelux Journal entitled “A poetic Technology. #GraphPoem and the Social Function of Computational Performance.”

Co-editor-at-large for Argentina Sarah Moses recently published her translation of Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh, distributed by Scribner in the U.S. and Canada.

Want to join our team? Apply to our recruitment drive by August 10!