Place: Colombia

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Colombia!

Join us this week as our Editors-at-Large bring us news on the most recent bestsellers in the Philippines, the translation of board games in Bulgaria, and the posthumous publication of García Márquez’s final novel in Colombia. From Wattpad-homegrown Filipino authors to the politics of posthumous publication, read on to learn more!

Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Editor-at-Large, reporting from the Philippines 

The memoir of Korean mega boy band BTS (both its English and Filipino translations) and the novel Queen of the Universe (Tuttle Publishing, 2023) by 2015 Miss Universe titlist Filipino beauty queen Pia Wurtzbach have triumphed over the early 2024 bestsellers list as gazetted by the National Book Store (NBS), the Philippines’ largest chain of commercial bookshops. 

A source of the so-called ‘Pinoy Pride’ from said list are The New York Times chart-topping debut fantasy novel by Thea Guanzon, The Hurricane Wars (Harper Voyager, 2023); journalist and historian Ambeth Ocampo’s Cabinet of Curiosities: History from Philippine Artifacts (published last year by Anvil, NBS’s sister company); and Panda Book Awards-shortlisted Gail Villanueva’s Lulu Sinagtala and the City of Noble Warriors (HarperCollins, 2024), a children’s book imbued with ancient Tagalog mythological lore—all testaments that Filipinos read books written by Filipino authors. 

Populating the local fiction hits are Wattpad-homegrown Filipino genre fictionists, their works ranging from new adult to romance, from chick lit to fantasy—among others, Gwy Saludes’ The Rain in España (which has since been adapted into a popularised Viva One web series) and Safe Skies, Archer, both released last year by Precious Pages under Saludes’ penname 4Reuminct; Disney Panganiban’s Zombie University 3 (Lifebooks, 2023); and No Perfect Prince (Majesty Press, 2023) by Jonahmae Pacala or Jonaxx, dubbed as the country’s ‘Pop Fiction Queen’ and the most celebrated contemporary writer from my hometown.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

Literary news from Palestine, Egypt, and Latin America!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us news of a “literary cartography” of Palestine, the most recent literary fairs and festivals in Egypt, and censorship of Latin American authors in Florida. Read on to learn more!

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large for Palestine and the Palestinians, reporting from Palestine

Despite the burgeoning array of literary endeavors in support of Gaza, this dispatch aims to shed light on a profoundly comprehensive initiative. Back in July 2023, when we unveiled our coverage of the podcast entitled “Country of Words,” conceived and orchestrated by Refqa Abu-Remaileh, little did we fathom the vastness of Refqa’s overarching vision under the same title.

Country or Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature” was inaugurated by Stanford University in the last weeks of 2023. Rooted in the constellation paradigm within literature, this digital-born project aspires to retrace and remap the global narrative of Palestinian literature throughout the twentieth century, traversing the Arab world, Europe, North America, and Latin America. Nestled at the confluence of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, “Country of Words” establishes a networked locus for the data and narrative fragments of a literature in constant motion, harmonizing porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into a resilient, open-ended literary chronicle.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

News from Latin America, Greece, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a wide range of news from Latin America, Greece, and Spain; from censorship and literary awards to a slew of literary festivals, read on to learn more!

Miranda Mazariegos, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Latin America

In Colombia, Laura Ardila Arrieta’s book La Costa Nostra was pulled from publication days before going to print by Editorial Planeta, one of the most influential publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Ardila Arrieta’s book investigates one of the most powerful families in Colombia and was pulled due to “three legal opinions that proved to us that the text contained significant risks that, as a company, we did not want to take on,” according to Planeta’s official statement. Ardila Arrieta was signed by Indent Literary Agency a few days later, and her book has instead been published by Rey Naranjo, an independent Colombian publisher who stated that the publishing of the book represents “the desire to contribute so that the future of our democratic system improves and that education and reading empowers us as a society.” 

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Michael Benítez Ortiz

The rainbow: / a broken parachute of dreams.

This Translation Tuesday, we present “Shipwreck” and “Landscape” by Colombian editor, music journalist, and one-time candy vendor Michael Benítez Ortiz. Writing the oh-so-ordinary at a tilt, Ortiz imbues the commonest of surroundings with a new, often despairing perspective. Translated with fidelity by Jackson Reed, the following works serve as an introduction to the idiosyncratic work of this emergent poet. Read on!

Shipwreck

The sky is the sea standing on its head
where my paper planes
drown.

 

Landscape

The night:
a mass grave of stars.

The rivers:
tears of pregnant women.

Tree branches:
dismembered children’s arms.

The rain:
condensed blood in the sky’s refrigerator.

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Where the Poems Live: In Conversation with Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott

There’s a rawness, an honesty, and an urgent need of poetry that is both captivating and heartbreaking. Queerness is at the center of that . . .

Last fall, Katherine Hedeen and Olivia Lott published Almost Obscene (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), a wide-ranging selection of poems from Colombian poet Raúl Gómez Jattin (1945–1997), introducing English readers to the poet for the first time. 

Gómez Jattin’s poetry defies the contemporary impulse to categorize a book of poems or its poet in any straightforward fashion. A Colombian poet of Syrian descent, born in Cartagena, Gómez Jattin wrote from the margins of his literary culture on topics ranging from mental illness to homosexuality to drug use to Greek mythology; the distance between the poet’s life and his subject(s) often seems imperceptible. 

I recently had the chance to interview both translators over a series of emails, during which we discussed the collaborative process of translating this book together, as well as the “deceptively simple” queer poetics of Gómez Jattin, and exactly where in the body his poems ‘live.’ 

M.L. Martin (MLM): Thank you, Katherine and Olivia, for making time to discuss this powerful and important book, Almost Obscene, which is out now with Cleveland State University Poetry Center. I’m always curious about how translators find and connect with their translation projects. How did you first encounter Raúl Gómez Jattin’s work? And what aspects of his work—and his biography as a marginalized queer Colombian poet of Syrian descent—did you wish to share with English readers?

Katherine M. Hedeen (KMH): I first heard of Raúl when I traveled to Medellín, Colombia in 1997 to attend the International Poetry Festival. He had been a good friend of Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, whom I was traveling with, and he had just died. It was big news at the festival. Raúl was a controversial figure in Colombian poetry, as you can imagine, and the rebel rouser organizers of Medellín’s poetry festival had supported him. I got to know his work through Víctor; which I found both compelling and heartbreaking. He had been on my list of poets I wanted to see in English translation. Fast forward to 2012. Olivia was a student in my literary translation course at Kenyon College. Back then, I’d assign each student a poet to translate, normally one who hadn’t been translated yet. I assigned Raúl to her. She loved the work and eventually her manuscript became her honors thesis in Spanish at Kenyon. At this point, the project was all hers. I had only been involved as her thesis advisor. 

Olivia Lott (OL): Just as Kate says, Raúl was the first poet I translated, as part of her literary translation course and then honors thesis. The project took me to Colombia, where I taught English through the Fulbright Program and spent weekends and holidays traveling around the country to meet poets. My year there gave me time to read a ton of Colombian poetry and to get a sense of the literary scene. I always kept Raul’s work in mind. I was struck by how he was often excluded from national anthologies, and how even in Cartagena (the city where he lived most of his life) his work was difficult to track down in local bookstores. Through this experience I began to translate other poets, but I never abandoned the Raúl project, in part due to the possibility of “righting” his legacy through giving his work a second life in English-language translation. 

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What’s New in Translation: February 2023

New translations from Hungarian, German, and Spanish!

This month, we are excited to present new works in translation that consider survival and coexistence in many forms. From the Hungarian, renowned author Magda Szabó delves into the embittering effects of poverty and hardship. From the Spanish, Pilar Quintana creates a riveting familial portrait of vulnerable parents and too-wise children. From the German, Dr. Ludger Wess leads us on a journey to discover the smallest lifeforms amongst us. Read on to find out more!

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The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, New York Review Books, 2023

Review by Meghan Racklin, Blog Editor

In The Fawn, the latest of Magda Szabó’s novels to be translated into English, it is 1954 in Budapest. For Eszter, the novel’s main character (it is difficult to call her a protagonist), it is 1954—but it is also the interwar years and the years of the war, and it is also, disastrously, almost the future. “The Future . . .’” she thinks, “[t]hat was something I had no desire to build. I had enough of the past about me already for the thought to do anything but horrify me.”

The novel is Eszter’s account of her life and her surroundings, told in a monologue directed at the man she loves, and the language is as beautiful as Eszter is bitter. In Len Rix’s translation, Eszter’s sentences are full of clauses; she’s in a rush, trying to get out everything she wishes she had already said. She recalls, of the evening when her childhood home was hit by a bomb, “Mother neither wept nor blanched; we slept the sleep of the contented in the main hall of a school, along with everyone else who had lost their homes; I felt like the nation’s favourite child, everyone seemed to want to look after us, and the whole city shared our grief.” As her outpouring continues, details pile up like debris. 

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Fall 2022: Highlights from the Team

Where to start with our glorious Fall 2022 issue? Here are some entry points, courtesy of our global team!

Emma Ramadan’s work as a translator has been so important to me and my literary journey—not least because of the attentiveness she lends to the writers she translates from Francophone North Africa, such as Ahmed Bouanani. I also really admire the way she speaks about her process with Claire Mullen in her interview, the passion and commitment and genuineness that shine through, for instance, in how she discusses her feelings at finally finding a copy of Molinard’s Panics. It reminded me a little of Alice Guthrie’s work with Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast, which was also out of print and circulated online as low quality scans.

I really love the slow, meditative writing of Dejan Atanacković’s absent narrator in Lusitania (tr. Rachael Daum). When it ranges with a kind of radical exteriority over the ephemera that remains of Teofilović, and the marginal annotations of Stojimirović that accompany his journals, it reads almost like the prose of Sebald—with the enigma of Teofilović as one such central, inaccessible figure around which the story endlessly circles, never losing sight of the larger political and social context.

Laksmi Pamuntjak’s “The Tale of Mukaburung” could easily have been written and translated to pander to a white gaze, and it’s really to the credit of both Pamuntjak and her translator Annie Tucker that there is a pervasive self-sufficiency to the story and its world, a refusal to explain itself, a matter-of-fact revelling in the ordinariness of its own magic and ritual. This seems especially commendable when a dominant affect in the story is puzzlement and defensiveness, in confrontation with foreigners whose presence and purpose are unknown, even to the reader, until much later in the story when it is revealed that many among them are political prisoners.

—Alex Tan, Senior Assistant Editor (Fiction)

Olavo Amaral’s “Steppe (tr. Isobel Foxford) is exquisite in every way: the writing of the translation, the unusual subject matter, the relationship and emerging love between the two main characters and how it is described, the mood created by the atmosphere of snow and remoteness.

I have been following closely the horrors of Putin’s war in Ukraine and though still angry and frustrated by its continuation, I thought I was fairly hardened to the extent of Russian atrocities. But I broke down towards the end of Galina Itskovich’s War Diary (tr. Maria Bloshteyn), where the unspeakable rape and violence against children is put into words.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor

Kudos to Jonathan Chan for beautifully translating such ancient poems of Choe Chi-won, whose characteristic loneliness metaphorized in natural images is successfully rendered in translation.

think one of the most important missions of Asymptote is to sustain languages under oppression, be that a national language that is close to extinction or the voice of a people amid a political process of erasure. Lauren Bo’s review of The Backstreets by Perhat Tursun undertakes this mission in remarkable earnest and rigor, by not only posing the biopolitical question of survival faced by the Uyghurs but also diligently analyzing the text via a close reading, and ultimately marrying the two to derive a conclusion that engages readers with the enduring challenge of humanity that surpasses the violence that is immediately palpable: “The Backstreets is an account of survival and a reminder that even the cruelest elements of humanity are fabricated out of absurdity and fear of the uncertain.”

The elusive language of Krikor Beledian’s “Unpeopled Language” (tr. Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis) is delicate yet piercing, and while  the history of the Armenian genocide cannot be separated from the poetics of Beledian, its implementation of “the tool against the game of expression“ speaks to the broader context of the survival of a people and their language in and after the era of mass murder.  

—Megan Sungyoon, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

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Translators on a Train: Translation Workshops at the O, Miami Poetry Festival

In the end, the translator must be the best reader of the text to bring it into a new language and context, but they can always have help.

The O, Miami Poetry Festival is a month-long celebration of verse in Florida’s capital, with the mission of establishing a series of events, performances, and public exhibitions, so that “every single person in Miami-Dade County [can] encounter a poem.” The festival’s programming included a translation workshop held by Layla Benitez-James and Jorge Vessel, consisting of two intensive sessions dedicated to studying, discussing, and building upon the complex art of poetry translation. In the following dispatch, Benitez-James gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the going-ons of the workshop, and presents the fruits of the translators’ labour: a poem by Colombian poet María Gómez Lara.

At the end of April, across two continents and various time zones, a group of translators met virtually to discuss, translate, and workshop the poem “palabras piel” by Colombian poet María Gómez Lara. Organized by O, Miami in partnership with the Unamuno Author Series (UAS), the creative task was set as part of a translation workshop lead by two members of the UAS team: award-winning Venezuelan writer, translator, and engineer, Jorge Vessel (pseudonym for Jorge Garcia) and myself, a writer and recent winner of an NEA in translation. Over two sessions in consecutive weekends, we discussed translation theory, inspiration, and collaborated on a wonderfully challenging poem.

The translation workshop was hosted by O, Miami Poetry Festival Founder and Executive & Artistic Director P. Scott Cunningham, who took part in the inaugural Unamuno Poetry Festival in Madrid—the city’s very first anglophone literary festival (Scott’s poem “Miami” from his collection Ya Te Veo was translated into Spanish by Jorge for The Unamuno Author Series Festival Anthology). While the aim of the O, Miami festival is to help each and every person in Miami encounter a poem throughout the month of April, our personal goal in 2019 was to introduce over eighty poets and academics to Madrid’s literary community; as such, translation between Spanish and English has become an important part of both organizations.

Our objective for the workshop was to inspire and embolden participants to take up a translation project of their own, as well as to broaden their ideas of what those projects might entail. While we would open up a discussion about basic elements of translation, we also wanted to expand upon how these writers and translators thought about the overlaps and symbiosis of their creative processes—how the act of translation itself can be the spark or jumping-off point for inspiration. READ MORE…

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail

We hope you’re staying dry. If you’re looking for a book to curl up with, check out these staff reads—hailing from Colombia, Germany, and India. Sign up for our newsletter to get these recommendations delivered right to your inbox.

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Like an archaeology museum, Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses (New Directions, 2020), translated from the German by Jackie Smith and longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, catalogues objects, places, artwork, people, and animals lost to history across centuries of time and continents through twelve genre-bending and essayistic pieces, one of which was previously featured in Asymptote. Schalansky is a German writer and editor, whose previous novels grappled with the transience of things, isolation, and the disappearance of islands and species. Schalansky adopts a wide range of styles to enter the world of her material and reanimate the objects under consideration, while Jackie Smith captures the idiosyncratic form of each piece. Schalansky’s pieces are indeterminate, meandering collages of history, biography, memoir, and criticism. They are linked through their concerns with the ravages of time, the processes of decay, and memorialization. In the style of W.G. Sebald and Sir Thomas Browne, these pieces represent memento mori, in that they meditate on the disintegration of things, while also asking us to consider how the past is interpreted from writings, artifacts, and a discontinuous archive. These retellings of history are acts of preservation—they give voice to the silenced, reorient the reader toward an era, a place, or a person, while also probing the political and philosophical dimensions of memory and forgetting.

Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

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David, an aging painter losing his vision to macular degeneration, reflects on the most difficult night of his life: his son’s euthanasia twenty years ago. Such is the plot of Tomás González’s elegiac novel Difficult Light, translated from the Spanish by Andrea Rosenberg, and released by Archipelago Books. As David writes, he keeps returning to the night in New York City when his family waited to hear if his son, paralyzed and suffering, had followed through with his decision to die. Will the doctor show for the illegal assisted suicide in Portland? Will his son change his mind? Death permeates the novel. His son’s. His wife’s. His own, impending. But so does beauty, love, humor, and though it’s difficult, light.

—Kent Kosack, Director, Educational Arm READ MORE…

How to Start Women in Translation Month Off Right

Stock up this August with some of our favourite presses and titles!

The impetus to read women is very similar to the desire to read the world; one does not necessarily do it out of a purely social cause—though that can hardly be argued against—but because the profound, intelligent curiosity that sustains the act of reading can only be validated by reading variously, probingly, and with an awareness of life as it is being lived now. Even as the world of letters is slowly ridding itself of entrenched biases and definitions, it remains an indisputable truth that the idea of being a woman in this world continues to throb with chaos and fragility, and increasing globalist awareness only reinforces the fact that womanhood remains replete with mystery, inquiry, and greatly variegating methods of approach.

To find the language that does justice to this experience of living—whether or not womanhood is the subject—requires a persevering intellect and originality that one finds in the greatest of minds. A reader does not pick up a work of translated literature to learn how being a woman is done in that part of the world, but to be allowed entrance into a vast, ridiculously under-explored, realm of humanity, whose inner workings often prove to be—as a result of challenges that must be overcome—intellectually complex, stylistically thrilling, and revolutionary in their uncoverings of human nature.

That is why I, for one, am grateful for the existence of causes like Women in Translation Month, which celebrates the excellent work produced by women around the world and also urges towards an increased conscientiousness about our reading choices. In solidarity with our fellow comrades who support global literature, below are some incredible opportunities you can take advantage of this August.

Many presses are currently offering promotions for the duration of WIT Month. One of our favourites, Open Letter Books, is offering a generous discount for the women-written and women-translated books in their lineup. Some recommendations I can make confidently include Mercè Rodoreda’s Garden by the Sea, a gorgeously lyrical fiction of 1920s Barcelona; Marguerite Duras’ The Sailor from Gibraltar, of that terrific Durassian ardor and intimate poetry; and Can Xue’s Frontier, masterfully multilayered and graceful in its surrealism. Fum D’Estampa, a press specialising in Catalan literature, is also offering discounts on all their titles, with Rosa Maria Arquimbau’s brilliant melding of the personal and the political, Forty Lost Years among them.

The wonderful Charco Press, which time and time again has brought out exceptional Latin American works, has put together special bundles of their textsthree carefully curated sets of three books each. “Revolutions” includes Karla Suárez’s Havana Year Zero, a sharp and attentive novel about unexpected connections during Cuba’s economic crisis; “Interior Journeys” features the subversive, cerebral work of Ariana Harwicz; and lastly, “Stories of Survival” gathers narratives of persistence against violence and trauma, with Selva Almada’s incredibly powerful Dead Girls among them.

World Editions is another publisher getting it right, partnering with Bookshop to provide a list of highlighted titles. Included is Linda Boström Knausgård’s October Child, a poetic and elegant autofiction about the escaping borders of reality in her experiences with mental illness and memory loss. The Last Days of Ellis Island, the award-winning novel by Gaëlle Josse that centres around the painful tenets of migration, is also up for grabs. READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville

Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction—and the first to be translated into English—invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu.

Keila Vall de la Ville’s The Animal Days explores young adulthood at high altitude. The narrator pursues a passion for rock climbing as she struggles to navigate a similarly perilous life at home. But the world of climbing and her escape from civilization come with their own dangers, which close in as the narrative hurtles toward a suspenseful finale.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.

The Animal Days by Keila Vall de la Ville, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers, Katakana Editores, 2021

Rock climbing invites glib metaphors. Inspirational posters—prolific in offices where the only vertical challenge is conquered at the touch of an elevator button—often use summits to symbolize widely held values like perseverance and determination, but the experience of serious climbers is anything but universal. Their insular world trades on levels of pain, risk, and anticipation foreign to the average individual. Enough time in that world can warp perceptions of the other world—the one where the rest of us live. “Thanks to the mountain, you’re able to make out the mechanisms that dictate daily life, life on land. You come back different,” explains Julia, the young narrator of The Animal Days. “Now that your battery has been recharged, now that you’ve obtained this ultraviolet vision, you carry on until you need to plug back into the mountain again. Until everything starts to lose its luster.”

The Animal Days, Keila Vall de la Ville’s third work of fiction and the first to be translated into English, invites readers into the climber’s rootless milieu. Julia’s journey is a world tour of precipices, as she balances her obligations to her dying mother against an escapism inherited from her absent father. Estranged from her everyday surroundings, she finds intimacy among her climbing friends, who provide a respite from her internalized abandonment, and who alone can understand the peaks and falls of a life on ropes. They shirk steady jobs and spend their time chasing both chemical and literal highs.

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What’s New in Translation: October 2020

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

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Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

This week's latest news from Brazil, Hong Kong, and Central America!

This week, our writers bring you news of what’s happening around the world. In Brazil, a newly published collection draws together international voices discussing their experience during quarantine; in Hong Kong, tightened lockdown measures have meant book fairs and events moving online; and in Central America, the Autores en cuarentena event series is taking place online, whilst Carlos Wyld Espina’s essential political essay El Autócrata has been reissued. 

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has no doubt weighed heavily on writers, altering not only their physical workspaces and subject matter, but also their orientation to the art itself. In Brazil, the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) has invited 126 individuals and collectives to reflect on their experiences during quarantine, featuring multimedia work from writers, visual artists, and musicians, among others. Meanwhile, reflections have gone global with Para além da quarentena: reflexões sobre crise e pandemia, which showcases critical discussions from Brazil, Italy, France, Portugal, the United States, and Uruguay. The collection, released in June, is available in free pdf and e-book formats through mórula editorial.

Another new release, Pandemônio: nove narrativas entre São Paulo—Berlim [Pandemonium: Nine Narratives Bridging São Paulo—Berlin], takes a more in-depth look from two of the world’s major literary hubs: São Paulo and Berlin. Organized by Cristina Judar and Fred Di Giacomo, Pandemônio touches on the pandemic, the ongoing economic crisis, and the advance of authoritarianism, highlighting similarities and differences between São Paulo and Berlin. Featured authors include Aline Bei, Cristina Judar, Jorge Ialanji Filholini and Raimundo Neto (representing São Paulo) and Carola Saavedra, Fred Di Giacomo, Alexandre Ribeiro, Karin Hueck, and Carsten Regel (representing Berlin). Pandemônio illustrates the strength of collective testimony, highlighting how stories have the power to bridge experiences from distant corners of the globe. The book is available for free online at www.pandemonioantologia.com, and through Amazon. A full English translation will be released in August. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

Despite setbacks and delays, literature around the world is still going strong.

This week, our writers bring you the latest literary news from Brazil, Central America, and Hong Kong. In Brazil, literary communities are still going strong via online events and livestreams; in Central America, journalists and writers have been reaching audiences through online videos; and in Hong Kong, universities have been putting lecture series online for the public. Read on to find out more!

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

In the midst of rising political tensions, presidential disregard for the ongoing pandemic, and increased social distancing measures at the local and state levels, writers and readers have come together to help shape a new virtual literary landscape in Brazil. Over the past few weeks, with travel restricted and residents urged to stay in their homes, I’ve tuned in via Facebook Live, Instagram Live, Youtube, Google Hangouts, Zoom, and more to engage with authors from across the country. With some livestreams reaching two thousand-plus users in a single session, one thing remains clear: the Brazilian literary community continues strong, with readers now more than ever searching for opportunities to engage in dialogue and debate. To stay connected, you can follow writers and publishers on social media; subscribe to email newsletters; and check out how your local bookstore might be engaged with virtual encounters! READ MORE…