Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang

This collection is a map of the footsteps left inside . . . the subtle, often painful geographies of that in-between state.

It is impossible to think of Chinese modernist writing without the contributions of Eileen Chang, the Shanghai-born chronicler of twentieth-century social tumult, migrancy, urban dynamism, womanhood, and love. Across genres and languages, Chang’s work searches and breaches the intrinsic divides of society and culture to construct complex emotional architectures that are no less universal for their specificity, culminating in a body of work that coheres her various continents with perspicacity instead of generalization, centralizing the vital contemporaneous themes of fate, agency, and change. The collection Time Tunnel, a gathering of both stories and essays, illuminates the writer’s singular capacity to find the tenuous human threads that anchor down a restless era, evincing that nothing holds time together as much as living through it.

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 USD20 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. 

Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang, New York Review Books, 2025

Eileen Chang’s lifelong literary project was, in essence, an extended act of self-translation and a continuous rewriting of identity—not only between languages, but across the seams of time and space. This ethos is evident throughout the collection Time Tunnel, which takes its title and central metaphor from the story “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” 浮花浪蕊:

… 时间旅行的圆筒形隧道,脚下滑溜溜的不好走,走着有些脚软。

. . . time travel’s round tunnel, slick underfoot and hard to walk on. . .

The image gives shape to the collection and its stories and essays from across Chang’s career—including a hitherto unpublished manuscript from her husband’s papers, pieces translated from Chinese, as well as ones composed directly in English, mapping a landscape of displacement. As such, this tunnel is not a futuristic passage, but—as the translators Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang point out—“can only run backward,” pulling the characters and narrators into a precarious suspension between the author’s native Shanghai and an adopted America, between memory in the mother tongue and expression in another, between a haunted, bygone past and an un-belonging, unmoored present. This collection is a map of the footsteps left inside that tunnel: the subtle, often painful geographies of that in-between state.

In “Young at the Time” 年轻的时候, one of Time Tunnel’s short stories, Pan Ruliang’s pencil compulsively traces the same sharp-nosed profile in his book’s margins—a line so minimal it reveals “no hair, no eyebrows, no eyes,” yet one that cannot be mistaken for a Chinese face. This solitary act is his escape from a suffocating domesticity, defined by his father’s greasy, liquor-flushed face and the drone of his mother’s Shaoxing operas. The profile instead promises passage to a pristine, modern future, one that seems to realize itself in Cynthia, a Russian clerk he meets at the evening school. As they meet to teach each other Chinese and German, he is caught in the quagmire of reality: between the rigid textbook dialogues that hardly articulate his unspoken flutter, between his immaculate fantasy of a foreign lover and Cynthia’s oily chestnut hair, and eventually, Ruliang is thrown back into himself upon the realization that “. . . what he was in love with wasn’t Cynthia. He was in love with being in love.” When Cynthia pragmatically marries a Russian patrolman at the shabby wedding in a cramped, odorous Orthodox church, the line Ruliang compulsively draws finally deposits him into a deeper understanding of his present confinement. He never returns to those little figures again—perhaps because he has accepted the perpetual suspension that follows a failed leap. Unflinchingly, Chang transforms the brief convergence of two drifting souls into a meditation on the fissures between cultures, generations, and the relentless directions of time. While the story’s Chinese title 年轻的时候—literally “When [One Was] Young”—seems to address a general state, the English rendition as “Young at the Time” positions a present self looking back, fixing the gaze at a distant, receding moment.

This act of retrospection weaves too through “Genesis” 创世纪, in which Chang sketches the lives of three generations of Kuang women, strewn across the displacement of 1940s Shanghai’s gilded and decaying urban labyrinth. Grandmother Ziwei, daughter of the famous Duke Qi Wenjing, has sustained the crumbling dignity of her aristocratic family her entire life. Her “Complete Daughter-in-law,” trapped between the dim kitchen and the family’s disdain, becomes both the ultimate sacrifice and the “super-capable one” of the declining household. As for the granddaughter, Yingzhu, her “shabbiness for which no explanation could be made” becomes an ingredient for her emerging self-awareness. Her disillusionment with Mao Yaoqiu, who has persistently courted her at her pharmacy job, leads her to reject not merely the frivolous man, but perhaps too the traditional script that women must rely on men to change their destiny. Yet, with Yingzhu’s sigh—“Oh, why does a woman get only one chance her whole life long?”—and the story’s closing image of her grandmother’s cup of tea “by then cold as ice,” a stark realization dawns; Yingzhu’s presumed escape may have only led her into another cycle of the same enduring struggle. Still, her brief, incomplete rebellion illuminates that indomitable yearning of women to begin their own genesis, even under the heavy press of fate.

Indeed, the most dignified and poetic moments for Chang’s characters often arrive in deliberate acts of creating beauty and meaning amidst life’s inevitable messiness and indignities. This brings to mind Cynthia in “Young at the Time,” who, despite the sloppy priest, the dirty altar boy, the restless groom, and her rented dress, “made for herself the air that a bride should have, all that mystery and solemnity.” In this, “Cynthia was the only beautiful person in that entire wedding ceremony. She seemed determined to make for herself something beautiful to remember.”

But always in change, there is a drifting. Chang renders liminal existence in “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” as a bodied experience aboard a cargo ship. Luo Zhen, uprooted by her era, is moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong, then onward to Japan. As an “old man’s young daughter,” she is a belated, almost superfluous presence in her family, and her job as a minor clerk is cheapened by the social upheaval. Chang, through an experimental multi-threaded narrative, interweaves Luo Zhen’s hardships across her journey with fragmented memories and the physical sensation of being adrift, presenting the migrant’s a retrospective and irreconcilably shattered world. Yet, beyond the disarray, Luo Zhen too is endowed with a feminine agency. Carrying her old typewriter, she confronts the street harassment and scornful gazes, facing the same trial as Cynthia: How does an individual safeguard their own self within the confines of a cramped existence? Her answer may be to carve out a temporary “vacuum tube” within her psyche:

漂泊流落的恐怖关在门外了,咫尺天涯,很远很渺茫。

The terror of drifting, destitute, was shut away outside the door, close by yet far away, distant and indistinct.

Beyond the individual, Chang is also interested in the interpersonal formations that emerge through change. In “The Lovely Limbs Cavort,” the widening gap between Zhao Jue and Enjuan as they grow from girls into women add a strain to their reunions—a toggling between memory and reality. Vividly rendering the intimacies of their youth—giggles under mosquito nets, infatuations with movie stars, vague explorations of sex and politics—the story forms a distinct desolation between Enjuan’s later success and Zhao Jue’s rootless existence. This time tunnel does not lead back to a warm past, but to an origin long lost.

Zhao Jue is the quintessential suspended self. In love, her pure, almost ritualistic homosexual affection for He Surong shatters when she perceives He’s politically exploitative motivations, and her “medieval romance” with the Korean wanderer Choi Sang-il ends without resolution. In identity, she belongs neither to her homeland nor to the new world. Enjuan, by contrast, appears to be the one who has successfully navigated the tunnel, but when Zhao Jue’s final realization comes—“Could it be that Enjuan had never fallen in love?”—the worldly triumph seems to have been won at the cost of never having truly lived. In the end, the two fates stand in opposition—one “classy,” the other “based” and “devalued,” as all the clamor of youth fades into a vast silence, marked by “no further correspondence.”

In the essay “New England Is China,” Chang exercises her determination that the non-fiction genre, distinct from fiction, should maintain a certain “reserve.” Her choice to write in her additional language, English, also lends itself to an aesthetic distance between herself and her readers, as well as her subject matter. Through the calm gaze of a wanderer across borders, she constructs a speculative time tunnel spanning the East and the West; snow-covered New England’s “so many miles of pure uninterrupted landscape” instantly sparks in her the recognition of a Chinese painting scroll unfurling “endlessly in the bus window.” In a modern Western context, she identifies the most classical aesthetic mood of the East—yet the evocation is of an ancient China achievable only under the rule of Confucius, where “things were not picked up from the street; doors were not shut at night.” This startling dislocation reveals an eternal in-betweenness: Chang searches for the specter of China in New England, while confirming the loss of this ideal order in her native land through excursions back to Hong Kong and Shanghai. With a cool yet compassionate tone, Chang shows us that a “China” lost to history has miraculously become a living reality in a foreign land, and behind this discovery lies a complex solace and profound desolation: “. . . our dream of old China could have been true as it still is in this corner of the Western world, a living thing even if it is not our own.” Here, one senses the power of using an external language to articulate the most intimate, core sense of loss within the author’s own culture.

Another essay written in English, “Return to the Frontier,” opens with a surreal episode: being mistaken for Mrs. Nixon upon landing in Formosa en route to Hong Kong. With this incident, Chang has become a misplaced observer of ambiguous identity. Her focus is then led to ordinary individuals swept up by grand historical currents: bedbugs in a mountain lodge across the road from where Chiang Kai-shek, the founder of the New Life Movement, used to reside; a bus brawl over fare evasion; a young man’s “distinctly Japanese” salute; the old lady who sews dozens of pairs of nylon stockings into her padded jacket; the Communist sentry on the Lo Wu Bridge who, in the sweltering heat, offers her “warmth of race … for the last time”; and her Hong Kong landlord’s family, whose profound emotional and material ties with relatives on the mainland are wrapped in the minutiae of daily life—sending noodles, soap, or cubes of British-made chicken cubes. All these details converge at the central, insurmountable boundary—the Lo Wu Bridge—which Chang compares to the Naiho Bridge that separates the living from the dead: “It makes me impatient to hear westerners quibble about the free world not being really free. Too bad that many of us have to go back over that bridge when we can’t make a living outside.”

The final piece in the collection, “1988—?”, elevates Chang’s retrospective aesthetic to a metaphysical plane. In it, she dissects the Los Angeles suburbs into three distinct horizontal strips—landscapes that overlay like “the stratified eras excavated by archaeologists.” The hills that the Spaniards first saw belong to ancient times, the “dazzling runways of an auto show” resemble the present, and the old yellow buildings below the bridge are reminiscent of the 1930s and 40s—back when “neither time nor space had some high price attached to it.” These three juxtaposed yet disconnected temporal layers form a panoramic view of the “in-between” space inhabited by the drifter. In this “empty city,” also dubbed the “Mecca of Car Culture” and a “bedroom community,” any traces of human presence—even in broad daylight—resemble “a guilty late-night curfew-breaker, sneaking and skulking until she’d gotten back inside again.” It is then in this deepened desolation of fractured time and space that a graffito on a bus stop bench utters the faintest yet sharpest cry:

Wee & Dee
1988—?

That evocative em dash is itself a suspended, unfinished tunnel of time, stretching out from the determined year toward an enormous question mark. This is the suspension of time, a portrait of a state of existence; the future is unknowable, the past is fractured, and the present drifts unmoored. It inscribes an intimate relationship onto a public, neglected landscape of exile.

These words are the drifters’ confessions, an outpouring-of-the-heart finally uttered under the sensation “of time itself bearing down”, and an exceedingly fragile, profoundly authentic assertion of the drifter’s subjectivity:

乱世儿女,他乡邂逅故乡人,知道将来怎样?要看各人的境遇了。

A boy and a girl in this wayward world, the two of them from the same place meeting each other in a foreign place—who knows what the future will bring? Have to see what the conditions of life entail, for each of them.

Time Tunnel illuminates that the in-between is beyond a space of transit; for many, it’s a permanent place of dwelling. In the crevices of time and the drift of individual lives, when the external world fails to provide meaning, one must become the poet and priest of one’s own existence—cultivating anchors out of nothingness. Even as the chalk marks of “Wee & Dee” fade in the Los Angeles sun, and as the cargo ship carrying Luo Zhen sails toward an unknown port, we follow these souls adrift in the fault lines of time, tracing their uneven footsteps through the tunnel and the prints of their palms along its walls. Despite the other losses, it is this quiet testimony, shimmering with the beauty of the in-between, that is sure not to fade away.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

The End Is Here: A Review of Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz

Ramuz is less concerned with the mechanics of catastrophe than with the psychological and communal refusal to accept it.

Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz, translated from the French by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, New Directions, 2025

Originally published in 1922, C. F. Ramuz’s Into the Sun is a quietly devastating depiction of the climate crisis, centring its narrative around the predicted outcome of the sun eventually engulfing the Earth. Catastrophe narratives can lean into the dramatic, but among Into the Sun’s distinctive qualities is the resistance of hyperbolic description and genre conventions; instead, Ramuz’s novel is filled with clarifying depictions of manifold human reactions—particularly silence, denial, and the stubborn persistence of everyday life. The structure of the novel, too, defies expectation, being composed of a series of vignettes that do not necessarily follow a narrative thread. Rather, the discrete elements resemble individual short stories that share the same backdrop and quiet, elliptical narrative. The result of these stylistic combinations work to create a text that feels distinctly contemporary, given the current global concern for climate change and its repercussions.

Ramuz’s discreet, almost detached tone is evident from the novel’s early chapters: ‘Because of an accident within the gravitational system, the Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun.’ In presenting the facts with a clinical eye, the arrival of the central revelation is underplayed, only previously intimated via subtle mentions of rising temperatures. As the news then spreads globally, the small lakeside town in which the novel is set (unnamed, but clearly Swiss in its cultural references) carries on as if nothing has changed. The villagers hear the warning, but they do not believe it. According to the psychologist Matthew Adams, eco-anxiety can manifest in a variety of ways, including denial, and this tension between knowledge and enforced oblivion forms the emotional core of Into the Sun: Ramuz is less concerned with the mechanics of catastrophe than with the psychological and communal refusal to accept it. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Mountain Hut” by Dragana Kršenković Brković

"Who approached you in Paris?” he asked again, his tone flat, not giving anything away. “You met up with someone. Who?”

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a timely tale of intrigue, political paranoia, and mortality from Montenegrin writer Dragana Kršenković Brković, deftly translated by Andrew Hodges and Paula Gordon. In the hills just outside Titograd (now Podgorica), a doctor, Dušan, is held captive by three members of Yugoslavia’s secret police—three men who refuse to believe his relationship with a Czechoslovakian woman, Janika, is merely an innocent love affair. What follows is a story by turns fantastically surreal and punishingly spare; relief may await Dušan in his dreams, but in the real world the mindless, brittle cruelty of the state returns his every truth with a blow. Writes Andrew Hodges, “Brković’s style is literary and fantastical, mixing surreal scenes full of abstract, dreamlike imagery with everyday encounters. This imagery, which here draws on contrasts between peaceful forest scenes and a violent human (political) encounter, is woven in alongside reflections and emotions that point to the futility and alienating power of politics. “The Mountain Hut” blends dreamlike imagery with Slavic mythological themes and enduring cultural motifs, all viewed through the prism of a specific political moment—the fallout from socialist Yugoslavia’s split with the Stalinist block.” Read on!

Forest on a mountain outside of Titograd. October 1948: Three months after the Tito-Stalin Split.

The weak light of the battery lamp moved through the dark, in sync with the short man’s heavy, uneven strides. Occasionally the light reflected off the glassy surface of the October snowdrifts, which had arrived earlier than usual, and sometimes it penetrated the thick needles of pine and fir, their snow-covered crowns drooping. The feeble beam sank into the depths of the wood, creating a trembling play of slender, spindly, dark blue-black shadows.

The frost tightened its grip.

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2025

Thoughts and inspirations from our latest issue!

Our latest—and fifty-seventh—issue draws together work from thirty-one countries and twenty-one languages, from antiquity to the boldly contemporary, the comedic to the compassionate, the historic to the experimental. To help you navigate this compendium, our blog editors offer up their favourites.

In one of the many street art pieces embroidering the surfaces of Athens, a black sign reads: ‘A memory of a memory that we are all left with.’ Greece’s capital is bound in all directions: to the bodies that live within its confines, the oblique and omnipresent archive, the dynamism of recollection, the strategies of function, the desperation of loss, the translucency of power, reality’s elasticity and its collapse. To be within it, then, is to acknowledge that no space is neutral—that the collective illusion of fixed borders, fixed pasts, and fixed stratagems of everyday life are gossamer comforts. There is nothing stable in the city. The condition of its existence is nothing less than a mass hypnosis.

‘When my parents told me we lived in Athens, I believed them.’ Amanda Michalopoulou writes in ‘Desert‘, translated with great emotional heft by Joanna Eleftheriou and Natalie Bakopoulos. Through a combination of confession and elucidation, the piece seeks to delineate the living morphology of present-day Athens from its manipulated dreams of cohesion and glory, earmarking the ‘transcendent’ objectives of the ancient city as a catalyst for its current fragility, the very definition of transcendence gesturing at an inoperable unreality, a beyond that persists only in attempts and potentialities. ‘A city that would invent cities and governments, language and liberty,’ so Athens grew with immovable conjectures of goodness and intelligence, until: ‘Step by step, they created a society that matched their insatiable vision of absolute power and control.’ The converge of experience and concept is chaotic, and space does not hesitate to dislocate itself from our comprehension. Thus, as Michalopoulou describes her ‘investigations,’ the city can perhaps be only understood via the fragmented origins of our most ancient texts, in those long-gone years where our present certainties had been amended, invented, reconstituted, and dismembered ceaselessly. The instability of today’s Athens resents the wonders and heights of its own birth, yet this shakiness is also evidence of another strength, for it is as David Graeber said: ‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.’ Our fictions have been our downfalls, but it is also our power.  READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

Literary updates from the Philippines, Bulgaria, and Hong Kong!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for the latest in literary news. From the efforts of Filipino literati for Palestine, to Bulgaria’s reckoning with the swiftly changing modern world and insightful essays and reviews on Hong Kong literature in translation, read on to learn more!

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

On 9 October, 2025, the feminist Filipino indie publisher Gantala Press debuted another monumental anthology at the Fine Arts Gallery of the University of the Philippines Diliman. The book, titled ‘Pagkat Tayo Man ay May Sampaga: New Philippine Writing and Translation for a Free Palestine, unites a vast range of voices in solidarity with Palestinian liberation.

The anthology was released by Gantala Press’s imprint, Publikasyong Iglap, which specialises in publishing timely literary works that address pressing ethnopolitical issues. It was co-edited by the press’ founder, Faye Cura, with Joi Barrios of the University of California Berkeley and UP Diliman professors, essayist Sarah Raymundo and fictionist-critic Rolando B. Tolentino.

‘Pagkat Tayo Man ay May Sampaga includes original writings from Filipino authors, including Luisa Igloria, the former Poet Laureate of Virginia, and Filipino-language translations of works by Palestinian writers such as the late Refaat Alareer and Fady Joudah. Alongside these new writings and translations, the anthology spans in-depth essays examining socially engaged writing, translation, and the anti-imperialist movement, supplemented by a practical teaching guide. READ MORE…

Our Fall 2025 Issue Is Here!

Featuring Nay Thit, Jen Calleja, Patrick Autréaux, and Johanna Drucker in our Special Feature on Attention

The world rewrites itself daily, unable to leave the past alone. As Trump’s relentless theatre once more monopolizes our gaze—proof, perhaps, of what Johanna Drucker, in her timely essay “Attention as Predation,” diagnoses as a civilization that is consumed even as it consumes—the question becomes what still endures beneath the smudged text of the present. Palimpsest, our Fall 2025 issue illustrated hauntingly by UK-based visual artist Jayoon Choi, turns to those deeper inscriptions: the faint, resistant traces that refuse to fade, the ghosts of meaning that survive the next rewrite.

In Amanda Michalopoulou’s “Desert,” Athens emerges as a manuscript of light and stone, its ruins glowing like marginalia of time. Carla Mühlhaus overlays the Black Dahlia murder and Andersen’s mermaid over Venice’s 2019 acqua alta, letting myth and crime shimmer beneath the rising waterline. Likewise, Barbara Köhler gives Homer’s Penelope her overdue monologue—both weaver and mermaid surfacing from the sediment of male authorship to reclaim their narratives. From Kazakhstan, Marat Uali laments the vanishing of minority tongues, an anxiety echoed in Tim Brookes’s interview on his Endangered Alphabets Project, where each carved script becomes an act of remembrance. In William Heath’s sparkling update, Herodas gives us drama composed on papyri—reminding us that even the most fragile art can defy oblivion.

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This issue’s wildcard Special Feature, “On Attention,” brings together thinkers and storytellers who resist the culture of erasure. Monika Vrečar asks whether poetry can still exist amid the static while Farah Ahamed, in an astute piece of film criticism on the Bollywood classic “Lagaan,” notes that the monsoon is also a season in the body. Elsewhere, Korean artists Koi and Hyungmee Shin—hailing from opposite sides of the 38th parallel—make masterful use of fabric to create radiant topographies of encounter, while Ecuadorian master Pablo Palacio’s “The Double and Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor) anatomizes the fractured identity of a pair of conjoined twins with a proto-modernist precision that feels radical in our own fragmented age. To read these works together is to experience literature’s own layered materiality.

If this issue has a thesis, it is that world literature does not replace; it accrues. Help us write the next layer: submit to the second installment of our “On Attention” Special Feature (as well as to our regular categories) and apply to join the team (deadline: November 1st)—we especially welcome applicants to the Assistant Editor (Fiction) role. A final note for the record: László Krasznahorkai, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, appeared in our pages twice—long before Stockholm called. If this kind of early, global advocacy matters to you, please become a sustaining or masthead member today—the vital margin note that keeps this palimpsest legible, and gloriously alive.

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Stone that Treads on Stone: An Interview with Irizelma Robles and Roque Raquel Salas Rivera on Poetry as Alchemy

Myths give us some rituals, some explanations for life, ways of acting in this life.

Awarded the Pedro Lastra International Poetry Prize by the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2019, Puerto Rican poet and essayist Irizelma Robles percolates ritualist practise, alchemy, and the occult into her scholarship and poetry. Her fourth poetry collection, El libro de los conjuros (Editorial Folium, 2018), embodies this fusion. The text has been translated into English by Puerto Rican poet and translator Roque Raquel Salas Rivera as The Book of Conjurations and was published by Sundial House last June 2024. In this spell book, Dr Robles writes about how “water will make way for the earth / that will listen” and “pieces of language / erased like mist,” summoning skies, substance, soul, and source. In his translator’s note, Dr Salas frames poetry as alchemy: “transmutation through words . . . transform[ing] poet, reader, and language.”

In this interview, I spoke with Dr Robles (in New York) and Dr Salas (in Puerto Rico), on El libro de los conjuros / The Book of Conjurations and the mutability of poetry through the lens of alchemy.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Irizelma, your remarkable poetry collection from 2018, El libro de los conjuros, is now out in Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s translation as The Book of Conjurations. Taking us back to that period and before, what were the creative impulses and poetic foundations that shaped this work?

Irizelma Robles (IR): Ten years before it was El libro de los conjuros, its title was La tabla periódica (The Periodic Table) and when I began writing it in 2016, it was titled El libro de la Santa Muerte (The Book of the Santa Muerte). I did fieldwork in the Huaxteca region of Veracruz and Hidalgo during my student years under the direction of my anthropology professor, Ana Bella Pérez Castro. It was during that period that I came across El libro de la Santa Muerte, a book of conjurations and spells. Later, in conversation with Eugenio Ballou, my friend and editor, we discovered that its true title was El libro de los conjuros.

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Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Antti Salminen

Insurgent, effective, obedient stronghold... And we built it all.

This Translation Tuesday, we present fragments of poetry found embedded in text and in testimony, pried from their source and polished to a sheen. Two poems by Finnish poet Antti Salminen, translated by José Luis Rico,  “Autoethnographical Sketch of the Pipe” and “Reminiscence of Settlement History” , evoke a diamond mine deep in the Siberian hinterland, a cold hell: the frost, the sludge, the desolation of the frozen pit, the hasty brutish ingenuity of the Soviet mining engineers, and the miners’ deadly toil.

Autoethnographical Sketch of the Pipe, Fragment from the Second Chapter

Mir, Mirny, open pit mine, mineshaft. 62º31 45.95 N 113º59 36.74 E: funnel-shaped ravine and artificial crater, the abyss the last people dug for themselves.

A small airport with its brief runway on the massive mining landscape’s earthwork. A glider hangar. There, where a small mining town had been, now a silent, mossy, pebble beach made of cement. No building was left standing, the purpose being to render the place as repulsive as possible for at least a thousand years. The magnitude of the risk was unknown, but there was no alternative.

When the place was initially dug, says Junifer, the mining engineers melted the winter frost from the ground with turbojets. There’s no rush to go further down, we’re already at the bottom. Work continues underground, slowly. Now we work with our hands, in small gestures. The shovels are less than weapons, and the excavators sit idle like a mighty beast’s skeleton at an open-air museum.

The serpentine road leads downward to the funnel, down to the bottom, to the pond’s gravelly beach. The road is ridden with sinkholes, which are patched and driven over however possible. In the molten-ground season: sludge, sludge everywhere. From October to April the amount of ice is impossible. The struggle against the ground frost can’t be won. But when you live through a permanent sinkhole, you learn to harness gravity. READ MORE…

Violence and Devotion: A Review of Love Never Dies by Eka Kurniawan

Kurniawan portrays heterosexual love at its patriarchal, misogynistic extreme.

Love Never Dies by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker, Hanuman Editions, 2025

The Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan has been prolific in the novel form, having looked at the forces that negate death in Beauty is a Wound, translated by Annie Tucker, and the forces that create death in Man Tiger, translated by Labodalih Sembiring. However, while working on his third novel, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (also translated by Tucker), the gifted author published two collections of short stories—the second of which begins with the novella Love Never Dies. Stripped of its surrounding stories, this novella is now appearing in English as a standalone volume.

Perhaps the choice to publish Love Never Dies separately was a choice made by Tucker, Kurniawan’s long-time translator, or perhaps by the publisher, Hanuman Editions—but either way, the text now appears more important in its English edition, as a volume on par with Kurniawan’s novels and a distinct step in the author’s career. Indeed, Love Never Dies should be considered as such. It cleanly synthesizes the themes of Kurniawan’s first two novels, determining that the forces creating and negating death are the same thing, and names that force “love”—or specifically, a man’s love toward a woman. From the first pages, it will be clear to any reader familiar with Kurniawan’s work that Love Never Dies is in conversation with its predecessors; Mardio, the seventy-four year old protagonist, seems to recall Margio of Man Tiger, and although the characters are different, the association between their names hints at the former’s future, and the murder predestined to take place at the novella’s end.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest literary news from France, Palestine, and Kenya!

This week, our editors report on a busy literary season, filling us in on awards to watch for, considering the politics of prizes, and reporting on exciting literary festivals. Read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

The French literary awards season is upon us! Over the course of the last few weeks, the juries of prizes such as the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis have announced their shortlists and/or laureates. Though the Goncourt is arguably the most well-known and prestigious of France’s literary awards, there are countless others awarded each year, from those awarded by the Académie Française to those given by individual bookshops, each of them celebrating Francophone and world literature in their own way.

Les Deux Magots, a well-renowned Parisian literary café with 140 years of history behind it, awarded its 92nd yearly prize last week to Swiss author Joseph Incardona for his recent novel Le monde est fatigué. The novel follows a young woman who acts as a mermaid at aquariums, but whose fake tail hides a body damaged by a grievous accident for which she is determined to seek revenge. Le monde est fatigué has also been longlisted for the Prix Femina, alongside works by other celebrated Francophone authors such as Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Au grand jamais and Nathacha Appanah’s La nuit au cœur. The prize’s shortlist is set to be announced on October 21st, with the winner announced November 3rd.

The prize that I, personally, am watching most closely is the Prix Décembre, which defines itself as a sort of “anti-Goncourt”. The longlist includes works such as Laura Vazquez’s Les Forces (whose poetry appeared in Asymptote’s October 2022 edition) and the newest novel of Wendy Delorme (whose work was recently translated and featured in one of Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday columns). Last year, the Prix Décembre went to Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa, a past laureate of PEN America’s Literary Translation Award who has also appeared in several of Asymptote’s past issues. The laureate is set to be announced on October 28th.

Shatha Abd El Latif, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Palestine READ MORE…

The Powerful Motion of the Text: An Interview with Martina Vidaić and Ellen Elias-Bursać

[The novel's] not about the war or the post-war era, nor any of the themes that readers usually expect from the Balkans or from Croatia.

In Bedbugs, Croatian writer Martina Vidaić applies the epistolary to full-throttle effect, drawing out nearly two hundred pages of a woman’s complex and impassioned pursuit of selfhood and liberation. Through a voice that is humorously inviting, incisively driven, and utterly idiosyncratic, the novel draws from the architecture of Zagreb, the “unhappy villages” of the countryside, the omnipresent strangeness of the world and its people, and the turmoil of an intelligent, haunted mind to iterate our contemporaneity, its violence, its absurdity. Ellen Elias-Bursać’s English translation is alluring in its freneticism, all resulting in one hell of a ride.

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 USD20 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. 

Ellen Sprague (ES): I’m really glad that a Croatian title has come to the Asymptote Book Club. And this is not just any book for so many reasons; one of them being the fact that it won the EU Prize for Literature in 2023. I wonder if you might have anything to say about how this book came to the attention of the EU Prize and its ultimate awarding.

Martina Vidaić (MV): I wrote this book in 2021, and with the Croatian edition, there were some critics who liked it, and some others not. It didn’t have a lot of success, actually, with the Croatian awards—but I didn’t expect much because Bedbugs is a pretty unconventional book for the Croatian context.

Still, I hoped for a little bit more regarding the reception in general, and I was very, very surprised when a Croatian jury for the European Union Prize for Literature chose this book to be nominated. The prize is mostly for emerging authors—such as those who haven’t been translated much or at all. The authors don’t have to be young, but there are a number of criteria; if they’re nominating a novel, for example, then it has to be at least the author’s second novel. It’s a very nice award for young poets and writers, because it then offers the opportunity for translation. Obviously, I was very happy when I was nominated, but I really didn’t expect anything. The Prize isn’t limited to just countries in the EU—other European countries are included, forty-one in total, but divided into cycles. Every year, the cycle has thirteen or fourteen countries, and in 2023, Croatia turned out to be included, with my book ending up as the overall winner.

I was very lucky that Ellen was translator of the sample pages submitted. I think that was very important, because the jury decided based on those forty pages.

Ellen Elias-Bursać (ESB): Also, Sandorf Passage were very pleased when they were able to publish it, and the translation itself of the winning book is subsidized by the European Union, so that makes it nice for everyone. It’s a wonderful thing to be part of the whole operation.  READ MORE…

Magic in Dialect: A Review of The Magic Ring

Shergin extolls the ordinary individual and honours the Pomorye dialect. . .

The Magic Ring, translated and adapted by Siân Valvis, illustrated by Dovilė Valvis, Fontanka, 2025

Enter Boris Viktorovich Shergin, Soviet Pomor writer, folklorist, and illustrator from Arkhangelsk, hailed as The Bard of the Russian North (Певец Русского Севера). Shergin was famous for his vivid storytelling for children, specifically regarding various facets of traditional Pomorye life, delivering his tales in a native Pomor/ White Sea dialect that was praised by some of his greatest admirers—including the sculptor and puppeteer Ivan Efimov, who stated that through him, we can hear the ‘undistorted voice of our ancestors’ («неискаженный голос предков»). Although originally penned in 1930s, many of Shergin’s stories, including ‘The Magic Ring’ (‘Волшебное кольцо’), did not appear in print until much later, with Russification standardising the Moscow dialect while suppressing minority and regional languages.

Shergin’s work was finally brought to us in English this past summer by publisher Fontanka and translator Siân Valvis in The Magic Ring, in which one of Shergin’s stories stands alone from its sibling folklore. The tale begins with Vanya, the protagonist sent to pick up his mother’s pension, only to be distracted by a muzhik mistreating various animals. The first time Vanya encounters the man, he saves a dog; the second, a cat; and the third, a snake. However, the latter is no ordinary serpent; she is Skarapeya, a magical snake queen prominent in Russian and Slavic folklore. In expressing gratitude, Skarapeya instructs Vanya to return her to her father and kingdom with some crucial advice: READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Lord of the Waters by Giuseppe Zucco

So, this was where all the rain we’d been missing for months had got to...

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a story of the calm before the storm. Picture the sky moments before a fierce downpour: dark, oppressive, hanging over your head like a threat. This excerpt, taken from Italian writer Giuseppe Zucco‘s novel Lord of the Waters, imagines a life suspended in that moment, where the rain never comes. As the external world slows to a standstill, one family’s internal world begins to change. Freed from the obligations of social conventions, work, and school, they quickly descend into a chaotic, easy existence of games, junk food, and neglect, rewriting their familiar dynamics. Beneath their frantic cheerfulness is a persistent anxiety, as they wonder when the amassed rain will finally hit. Translator Antonella Lettieri smoothly captures these currents, refracted through the child narrator’s unaffected voice.

Amongst all the children, I was the first to look up at the sky and see it rear up. I didn’t quite see but rather felt a vast wave soar above me.

I ducked immediately, covered my head with my arms, and, thus crouching, prayed that that wave would not pull me under and wreck me upon the lamp posts and the buildings.

As I closed my eyes, I tried to picture my mother and father, hoping it would help me muster up some courage. All I could see, though, was that gurgling scene, which yet had a certain cheerfulness to it: all the other children and I doing mad somersaults inside the roiling heart of a wave fallen from the sky, our little heads bobbing atop the horrific crests of that brilliant white foam.

My sorrow lasted a second or two; then, since no water came upon us and no dreadful flood crashed down on my head, I opened my eyes again.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur.

At the center of the story is a wealthy notary named Ludovic Possible, who runs a school in Böen—primarily with the motive of getting close to his illegitimate daughter, Aida. When a two-week long rainstorm hits the region, Aida’s mother, Gracilia, dies, and Ludovic reveals himself as Aida’s father, taking over her care. Yet, what truly drives Dahomey’s narrative is the tenets of community and storytelling. Ludovic falls in love with Gracilia because of the way she tells stories, and she passes these tales to Aida; before the child was born, Gracilia “. . . placed a hand on her lower abdomen and told her fertile ovaries the very first story she’d learned from her own mother, who’d learned it from her grandmother, who’d learned it from her great-grandmother. . .”—and so on, all the way back to their first ancestors. Fittingly, the story itself is about a chantrèl who was admired by all: “When she spoke, things would happen. When she made demands, people got to work. With her voice, the rapture caused men to fear for their own sanity.”

Aida internalizes the story and, after her mother’s death, becomes the chantrèl. Armed with the tales passed down from her mother, the young girl builds and fortifies a circle of people who will come to care deeply about her, who will fight on her behalf. Building on the singular capacity of stories to bring people together, Duels captures their particular power within the historical context, demonstrating how the act of telling can frighten those in power and liberate those in captivity.

Whether against an elemental antagonist or a human one, the people in Böen unite to enact change through rebellion. As Duels connects the creation of such solidarities with storytelling, it also works to help the citizens of a tumultuous country imagine a future where violence, injustice, and exploitation no longer govern—necessary work for any nation undergoing immense transformation.

diving board

Diving Board by Tomás Downey, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Invisible Publishing, 2025

Review by Regan Mies READ MORE…