It’s here! The first issue of Asymptote’s second decade, featuring Hoda Barakat, Can Xue, Bruno Latour, and Lêdo Ivo, alongside new work from 35 countries, confirming “we all live in a beautifully round world.” More than any other issue in recent memory, “Age of Division,” our Summer 2021 edition, also speaks to the current divisiveness of our times.
In Ethiopian writer Mulugeta Alebachew’s short story, childhood memories are betrayed when the narrator returns home after a long time away only to find his friends “intently drawing family trees and working out ethnic background of people as if they worked for the cartography agency, and it was their task to draw boundaries.” Meanwhile, at a “time of infinite sadness,” diasporic Palestinian poet Olivia Elias speaks to us of “a life in the eye of the hurricane” and of “a country / engulfed in a fault of history.”
