Dear friends,
This giving season, consider throwing in your support for the journal that none other than Dubravka Ugrešić (pictured above) recently called “the global literary miracle.”
In 2019, we brought you never-before-published writing from 70 countries and 44 languages—more than any other Anglophone magazine has unearthed. Though it may seem a miracle on the outside—a journal that puts so many underrepresented voices in conversation with established names like Dubravka Ugrešić and Viet Thanh Nguyen—it takes hard work behind the scenes to uphold both the diversity and the rigor of our content.
Why do we strive to include outsiders? Because we know what it’s like to be an outsider.
Our not-for-profit organization does not receive ongoing support from any government body, nor does it qualify for funding in the US, the EU, or the UK. (World literature is all about crossing borders, grants not so much.) A recent experience submitting to an award for magazines left us perplexed—the feedback made it clear that the reviewer did not understand the scope and constraints of what we do.
Now that the same bias that has led to a Eurocentric canon is imperilling Asymptote’s survival—threatening our own ability to continue advocating for underrepresented voices—we turn to the people who know our work best: you.
Asymptote accomplishes something rare and precious: powered by multicontinental editors on the ground, we seek out and publish the best in world literature, issue after issue. We take pride in discovering fresh new voices curated to the highest standards. Our nine years of activism have resulted in an archive of world literature sans pareil.
But it’s not just the work we do on our quarterly issues. What we do on numerous fronts (from our nine social media platforms in four languages to our daily blog and Book Club), we do to make literary culture available to the widest audience for generations to come.
So that Asymptote can continue to operate, consider becoming a sustaining member at just USD5 a month, or—if you can afford it—a patron at USD500 a year or a masthead member at USD1,000 a year. We are currently at 53 sustaining members and 2 masthead members; we need double these contributions to keep going beyond January 2020 and finish out our tenth milestone year.
Said Valeria Luiselli, “When I think of Asymptote, I stop fearing for the future of literary translation.” If not the readers who know us best, who will fear for the future of Asymptote?