Posts featuring Amélie Nothomb

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

December 17, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa, Andriana Hamas, and MARGENTO

The latest from Mexico, Bulgaria, Belgium, and Romania!

Though Asymptote is winding down with the year, literary events and going-ons continue to thrive around the globe. In Mexico, the Guadalajara International Book Fair presents its impressive line-up, and Polish female poets are celebrated in a new collection. In Bulgaria, the Christmas Book Fair returns to delight the locals. and in Romania, the Gaudeamus Book Fair features over one hundred exciting events. Read on to find out more!

Alan Mendoza Sosa, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Mexico

On December 10, Mexican editor, poet, and translator Isabel Zapata presented Dentro del bosque, an English-Spanish translation of the autobiographical essay Into the Woods by American author Emily Gould. The essay reflects on contemporary capitalist precarity through Gould’s personal experience as a young woman trying to make a living as a writer in New York City. Originally published in 2014, its translation into Spanish is part of the Editor’s Collection from Gris Tormenta, an independent publisher based in Querétaro, a rapidly growing state three hours north of Mexico City. Gris Tormenta has published several Asymptote contributors in the past, including Yuri Herrera, Tedi López Mills, and Thomas Bernhard.

On December 4, Mexican poet Rocío Cerón and Polish poet Marta Eloy Cichocka presented Luz que fue sombra, a Polish-Spanish bilingual collection of seventeen Polish female poets born between 1963 and 1981, translated by Abel Murcia and Gerardo Beltrán. The book was published in the Spanish independent press Vaso Roto, which has published Spanish translations of important authors such as Anne Carson, John Ashbery, and Ocean Vuong. It includes poems by Justyna Bargielska, Barbara Klicka, Krystyna Dąbrowska, and Urszula Zajączkowska. Julia Fiedorczuk, whose book Oxygen was reviewed for Asymptote by Elisa González, is one of the most renowned authors in the collection. The event took place in Talleres de Arte Contemporáneo (TACO), a cultural centre south of Mexico City dedicated to promoting and teaching contemporary art.

The 35th edition of the Guadalajara International Book Fair took place in Guadalajara, one of Mexico’s largest cities, between November 27 and December 5. It is considered one of the most important book festivals in Latin America. This year, the guest of honor was Peru, from where several important authors and artists travelled to Mexico to present their work, lead workshops, and host panels. Among them was Asymptote contributor Victoria Guerrero. Importantly, the events featuring Peru offered significant representation of literature written in indigenous languages, including books by Dina Ananco Ahuananchi, Gabriel Pacheco, Cha’ska Ninawaman, and Washington Córdova. The fair also featured both emerging and established authors from all over the world. Many of them have previously appeared in Asymptote, such as Ana Luísa Amaral, Georgi Gospodinov, Abdellah Taïa, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, and Alejandro Zambra.

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

Bulgaria has, for a long time now, been in the grips of mass paranoia, an all-encompassing misinformation campaign, and political turmoil. The health situation also not looking up; according to official statistics, the COVID-19 deaths are, sadly, approaching the chilling number of 30 000 since the beginning of the pandemic—a figure that definitely cannot be trivialised given the overall population. READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

January 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our Section Editors pick their favorites from the Winter 2020 issue!

We thought of the Winter 2020 issue as a fantastic salad, surprising and delightful in its compact variety. We’re willing to concede, however, that it is a large salad; the challenges it presents might be more approachable if they’re coming from a buffet. With so many delights and delectables on offer, where does one begin? Perhaps, we humbly suggest, with these selections from our section editors, which include a Federico García Lorca play and an Eduardo Lalo essay.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Kurdish Feature Editor:

Brought into English by Caitlin O’Neil (a former team member, I’m thrilled to say), Corinne Hoex’s sensuous—and sensational—Gentlemen Callers is full of exquisite treats, rivaling Belgian compatriot Amélie Nothomb’s wit, humor, and imagination. Although Asymptote makes it its mission to move beyond world literature’s Eurocentric focus, it’s gems like this that remind me that there’s still much to discover from smaller, less heard-from countries within Europe. I would consider it scandalous if Hoex’s fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road. From the Poetry section, Gnaomi Siemens accompanies her sexy, updated take of Ephemeris (horoscopes from the 16th century) with a thought-provoking note: “Horoscopes (hora / time, skopos / observation) are ephemeral. Translation is an observation of time and a holding up of the writings and ideas of one time to observe them in a new temporal context.” Pair with Joey Schwartzman’s 21st-century renderings of T’ang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Whip-smart and bittersweet, these timeless poems about transience will stay with you for at least a little while.

From Sam Carter, Criticism Section Editor:

This issue’s Criticism section introduces us to two poetry collections that embody the Asymptote mission by refusing to be contained by borders, whether linguistic or geographic. Our very own Lou Sarabadzic takes us through the important work done by Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology, which contains poems from ninety-three writers and nineteen languages in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of this terrible atrocity. And Emma Gomis reviews Time, Etel Adnan’s latest exploration of temporality and poetic form that arose from a series of postcards exchanged with the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar. READ MORE…

My 2019: Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

December 23, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

What follows is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me

Flaubert once said that one should read not for the purpose of instruction, but “in order to live.” Continuing our staff summations of 2019 in literature, Asymptote’s Educational Arm Assistant Katarzyna Bartoszyńska outlines an abundant year of reading, ranging from feminist favourites to autofiction to books about books, and in doing so, considers the sense of how books find their way to us, perhaps so that we may live.

Reflecting on my year in reading, I started to think about how various books came into my hands. I’m a literature professor, so a lot of what I read is determined by the classes I’m teaching, the syllabi I create. But making assigned book lists seems to have become a habit that spills over into the rest of my life as well—much of my reading seems to be part of various projects with lists of their own. It’s rare for me to randomly grab a book off my to-read shelf and just dive in, though I did just that with Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins, and it ended up being one of my favorite books of the year; a collection of formally dazzling short stories, whose pleasure was heightened for me, perhaps, because I entered it with almost no previous knowledge, and so was all the more delighted by every surprising twist and turn. I had a similar experience with Yiyun Li’s breathtaking A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. But as often as not, the result of such serendipity will be the creation of a new list—for instance, I’ve now resolved to read everything else Yiyun Li has written. What follows, then, is not a reckoning of everything I read this year, but rather a contemplation of the different ways that books assign themselves to me, and the highlights of these circumlocutious processes. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

November 8, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daniel Persia, Ruba Abughaida, and Sarah Moore

Our editors have you covered with the latest news in world literature!

This week, our editors report on the commemoration of Amjad Nasser, one of Jordan’s most celebrated writers, as well as Syrian poet Adonis’ discussion with his translator Khaled Mattawa at London’s Southbank Centre. From Brazil, the International Literary Festival of the Peripheries (FLUP) and the Mulherio das Letras have taken place, with both festivals seeking to give voice to underrepresented writers and speakers. In France, the winners of two of the most prestigious literary awards were announced at the beginning of the week. Read on to find out more!

Ruba Abughaida, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

This week, word-lovers celebrate the life and work of Jordanian poet, novelist, essayist, and travel memoirist Amjad Nasser (1955-2019), who launched his writing career as a journalist and activist for Palestinian rights. His debut poetry collection, Praise for Another Café, was published in 1979 when he was just twenty-four years old. A Map of Signs and Scents, a collection of sixty poems spanning from 1979-2014 and published by Northwestern University Press, features new English translations of his work by Fady Joudah and Khaled Mattawa.

In 2014, his poem A Song and Three Questions, was praised by Saison Poetry Library as “one of the fifty greatest love poems of the last fifty years.” Translator Jonathan Wright said of Nasser’s lyrical novel Land of No Rain: “I’m not sure what to call Land of No Rain. The publishers call it a novel. I call it a meditation.” 

The UK’s Southbank Literature Festival saw Syrian poet Adonis in conversation with Khaled Mattawa, Libyan poet and Adonis’ regular translator. They discussed poetry, translation, the blurred cultural lines between geographical points of East and West, and read their poems to a packed audience.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 6, 2019  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Quyen Nguyen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Follow our editors through France, Japan, and Vietnam as they bring a selection of literary news of the week.

This week, our editors are bringing you news from France, Japan, and Vietnam. After quiet summers in the literary world for many countries, September brings the literary scene back to life. In France, the anticipation is building ahead of the most prestigious literary prizes being awarded. In Japan, a new edition of a historic quarterly is uniting Japanese and Korean literature through a shared feminist voice. And in Vietnam, the launch of a new anthology, as well as events held by prestigious translators, celebrate the ties that are created through translation.

Sarah Moore, Assistant Blog Editor, reporting from France

September in France marks the rentrée littéraire, with hundreds of new titles published before the big award season starts in November. The prix Fémina, prix Renaudot, prix Interallié, prix Médicis, and the prix de l’Académie française will all be contested, as well as the prestigious prix Goncourt.

Amongst the French titles announced for the rentrée, Amélie Nothomb’s Soif (Albin Michel, 21 August) is highly anticipated, although not at all unexpected—an incredibly prolific author, she has consistently featured in the rentrée littéraire every year since the publication of her debut novel, Hygiène de l’assassin, in 1992 (Hygiene and the Assassin, Europa Editions, 2010). With a narrative that takes the voice of Jesus during the final hours of his life, Soif is sure to be as audacious, controversial, and successful as ever for Nothomb.

Marie Darrieussecq’s new novel, La Mer à l’envers (P.O.L, 2019), examines the migration crisis, narrating an encounter between a Parisian woman and a young refugee, rescued from a capsized boat. Many of Darrieussecq’s novels have already been translated into English, including her first novel Pig Tales (Faber & Faber, 2003), and, most recently, The Baby (Text Publishing, 2019). An interview with her translator, Penny Hueston, for Asymptote can be read here and an extract of her translation of Men was part of Asymptote‘s Translation Tuesday series for The Guardian.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

March 8, 2019  |  in Dispatches  |  by Barbara Halla, Hodna Nuernberg, and Jacqueline Leung

This week, catch up on the latest literary news from Morocco, France, and Hong Kong!

We begin and end this week with a look at two of the winter’s biggest book fairs: Hodna Nuernberg accompanies us on a retrospective tour of the 25th Casablanca International Book Fair, while Barbara Halla lets us know what’s in store at next week’s Salon du Livre in Paris. Meanwhile, Editor-at-Large Jacqueline Leung, reporting from Hong Kong, updates us on a symposium taking place today to honor 2019 Newman Laureate Xi Xi.

Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco

Oft-maligned by Morocco’s cultural elite, Casablanca’s international book fair came to a close on February 17. The twenty-fifth edition of the fair saw 560,000 visitors, or 62% more than in 2017, yet publishing houses bemoaned a lack of serious readers. Indeed, the book fair, whose 10-dirham entry fee—about $1—is roughly the price of a big-city café au lait, is a resolutely popular affair where boiled-chickpea sellers rub elbows with poets, children careen wildly from stand to stand clutching brand-new Barbie notebooks, and azans ring out on loop from the Saudi pavilion. This year, 720 exhibitors from forty-two countries offered up some 128,000 titles, about a quarter of which were literary works. Although 80% of books published in Morocco in 2017-2018 were in Arabic, French punches above its weight in the literary domain, accounting for 30% of all published novels.

Catastrophe was narrowly avoided when Éditions Malika’s stand went up in flames during the fair’s final weekend. Apparently the result of a poorly-wired outlet, the fire destroyed much of the small Casablanca-based publisher’s stock and could have done much worse given that there were no fire extinguishers on site when the fire broke out. Fortunately, the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad had brought their own and saved the day. After the ashes were swept away and the shelves restocked, one of the book fair’s finest offerings could be found at Éditions Malika: the sumptuously illustrated Casablanca, nid d’artists by Kenza Sefrioui and Leïla Slimani, which features the work of 115 artists.

Meanwhile, New York-based artist Meriem Bennani is back in Morocco, working on a film project about French soft power and neocolonialism for the upcoming Whitney Biennale. The project involves filming the well heeled students of Bennani’s alma mater, Rabat’s Lycée Descartes—the crown jewel of the French Republic’s mission étrangère, whose tuition is about twice Morocco’s annual official minimum wage. Bennani describes it as a kind of “coming out” in the context of a society that has been quick to label her work as that of a marginalized minority artist.

READ MORE…

Winter 2013: The Journal That Never Sleeps

September 9, 2018  |  in 30issues30days  |  by Jacob Silkstone

In a world that moves with bewildering speed, Asymptote stops to linger over each work and give it all the time and close attention it deserves.

We are not told officially; the longlist simply lands on 3:am’s website without fanfare. I stumble upon it two or three days after the fact. Disbelieving at first, I click on the hyperlink. Only when Asymptote’s familiar landing page flashes on my screen do I accept what has happened: Within two years of the magazine being launched, we have been nominated for Magazine of the Year! Just as miraculously, Jacob Severn (one of two amazing Jacobs interning for us that quarter; the other being Jacob Silkstone, who provides the inspired introduction below as Assistant Managing Editor) tells me his wife overheard someone next to her on the New York subway recommending the journal over the phone. Of the eight events ambitiously planned within three weeks of our second anniversary, I’m directly involved in two of them (find photos of all 34 events we have ever organized here). The Beijing one doesn’t go too smoothly (not only does photographic documentation fall through, I experience an embarrassing moment of brainfreeze during the event; I had planned to prepare for the panel after launching the issue and rushing to the airport for my flight to Beijing, but cold medicine knocked me out for most of the overnight flight and for most of the day leading up to the event itself, so I showed up to my first-ever Asymptote panel on an empty stomach, in the midst of a freezing Beijing winter). But that is irrelevant. I still wouldn’t have given up meeting readers in the flesh for anything. As, one by one, actual readers come up to talk to me after the panel, it feels I’m meeting whom all the hard work has been for.

Asymptote is the journal that never sleeps. Pick any hour of any day and you can be reasonably certain that, somewhere in the world, someone is working on an Asymptote article, someone else is editing a submission, and still another person is writing a review of a newly translated book. (In its early years, you could be reasonably certain that one of the three was our editor-in-chief,  tirelessly working to shape “the premier site for world literature in translation.”) The story of how the journal’s ninth issue came together is—at least from my perspective, the perspective of a 23-year-old intern—one of sleepless nights, dozens of emails back and forth, and marathon sessions in front of an increasingly blurry laptop screen.

Midway through 2012, I returned from half a year working at an international school in Dhaka after graduating from an MA programme. If you’ll allow me a couple of slightly over-indulgent metaphors, I’d imagined university life as a straight path leading into a mist-obscured wood, or a bright circle of fire around a thick knot of darkness. I’d reached the end of the path and the fire burned a little colder than before. To borrow Chuya Nakahara’s lines from “Goat Songs”: READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

August 24, 2018  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Julia Sherwood, and Lindsay Semel

Print houses and jury panels are busy, autumn is coming.

Fall’s footsteps can already be heard in literary circles. As summer hosts its last open-air festivals, prize organizers and publishers are gearing up for a new season of surprises. In today’s dispatch, our Editors-At-Large from Europe tell us more about what is going on in the Czech Republic, Portugal, and France in this transitionary period. Come back next week for this summer’s last dispatch. 

Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Czech Republic:

Held from 1 July to 4 August at venues in five cities – Brno, Ostrava, Wrocław, Košice and Lviv – across four countries, Authors‘ Reading Month (ARM) may well be Europe’s biggest literary festival. It is certainly a major logistical feat: now in its 19th year, the festival featured 100 authors from six countries. Turkey alone, this year’s guest country, was represented by more than thirty authors, including Nedim Gürsel,  Murathan Mungan, Ayfer Tunç and Çiler İlhan. A strong Czech contingent featured prize-winning novelists Bianca Bellová and Josef Pánek, bestselling writers Michal Viewegh and Alena Mornštajnová, as well as a plethora of poets.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

May 4, 2018  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Catherine Belshaw, Diána Vonnák, Jacob Silkstone, and Manel Mula Ferrer

The best in the international literary scene right here at Asymptote

Welcome back for a fresh week of literary news from around the globe, featuring the most exciting developments from Hungary, Norway, Spain and the Caribbean. 

Diána Vonnák, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hungary: 

A major literary event, the 25th International Book Festival was held in Budapest between 19-22 April. The annual festival is not only a feast of newly published Hungarian literature with roundtable discussions, speeches, and meet-ups, but also a hub for translated literature. This year, Serbia was the guest country, with invited authors such as Milovan Danojlić, Laslo Blasković, Dragan Hamović, Igor Marojević, Radoslav Petković, Dragan Velikić, and Vladislava Vojnović. Authors discussed the place of Serbian literature in the broader European context, and their Hungarian translators talked about the translation process.

A highlight of the Festival was guest of honour Daniel Kehlmann’s discussion of his recent book Tyll, a chronicle of the Thirty Years War, featuring the archetypical German trickster Till Eulenspiegel. Kehlmann received the chief award of the Festival, the Budapest Prize, previously awarded to Jorge Semprún, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass, and Michel Houellebecq, among others.

The International Book Festival was not the only place where great news about translated literature could be shared these weeks. The Hungarian Books and Translations Office of the Petőfi Literary Museum announced the list of subventioned books for the first half of 2018. Asymptote contributor and Close Approximations winner Owen Good received support for Krisztina Tóth’s Pixel, soon to be published by Seagull Books. We can also look forward to Peter Sherwood’s translation of The Birds of Verhovina by Ádám Bodor, supported by the same agency.

András Forgách’s No Live Files Remain has just been published by Simon and Schuster in Paul Olchváry’s translation. The book narrates Forgách’s reckoning with his mother’s past as an informant of the Kádár regime. Facing family histories and friendships compromised by agent activities is a peculiar genre in Hungarian literature—and literary traditions of virtually every country that experienced intense state surveillance. No Live Files Remain is a crucial addition to this thread, a mother’s story that could serve as a counterpart of Péter Esterházy’s account of his father in Revised Edition.

READ MORE…