What’s New with the Crew? (Nov 2022)

In addition to editing your favorite literary journal, Asymptote staff have been busy with publications this past quarter!

Philippine Editor-at-Large Alton Melvar M Dapanas’s lyric collage is included in Our Stories To Tell (Texas: Folkways Press, 2022), an anthology of essays on mental health, out now.

Chris Tanasescu aka MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova, has recently contributed, jointly with Raluca Tanasescu, a chapter on “Literary Translation in Electronic Literature and Digital Humanities” to the Bloomsbury anthology Translation Beyond Translation Studies and an article on “#GraphPoem: Holisme analytique-créatif, le genre D(H) et la performance informatique subversive” to the special issue on transmediality and convergence in literature of the journal Recherches & Travaux.

An essay, “Humor in the Dark,” by Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor, was published in the journal Translation Review. It explored some of the strategies Elias-Bursac used when translating Dubravka Ugresic’s counterpoint of humor and trauma in her book of essays The Age of Skin.

Incoming Visual Editor Heather Green moderated a panel on “Word + Image,” featuring translator Alta L. Price and artists Verónica Gerber Bicecci and Abdulrahman Naanseh at the Center for the Art of Translation’s Day of Translation conference. She also recently reviewed poetry titles by Iman Mersal (tr. Robyn Cresswell), Shuri Kido (tr. Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander), and frequent contributor Eugene Ostashevsky for the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books.

Ian Ross Singleton, Nonfiction Editor, took part in a two-way interview with writer Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for Punctured Lines, a blog on Post-Soviet literature. The two writers discussed their respective novels, Two Big Differences and The Orchard.

In September, José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large for the Central American region, published his translation of Solito, a memoir by Salvadoran-American poet Javier Zamora, with Penguin En Español.

Editor-at-Large for Slovakia Julia Sherwood and her husband Peter Sherwood’s first translation of a graphic novel, the horror detective story The Sisters Dietl by the Czech author Vojtěch Mašek, was published by Centrala in October. On 25 October, Julia gave a talk at the Bohemian National Hall in New York City entitled “Continuity or Change? Post-war and post-communist perceptions of the Shoah in Slovak literature.”

Director of the Education Arm Kent Kosack published short stories in 3:AM Magazine and L’Esprit Literary Review, essays in Hobart and autofocus, reviews in Full Stop, the Chicago Review of Books, and World Literature Today. His essay, “Cells,” first published in issue 18.2 of the Cincinnati Review, was also selected for inclusion in the notable essays list in Best American Essays 2022 edited by Alexander Chee.

Assistant Managing Editor Laurel Taylor’s translation of Fujino Kaori’s “The Smartphones Aren’t There Yet” appeared in Monkeys Translators to Watch For.

Editor-at-Large for Macedonia Sofija Popovska’s translations of three poems by Lou Andreas Salome appeared in Circumference Magazine on August 28.

Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora, has a review of Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts in NPR, discussing how the novel is partly inspired by Václav Havel’s celebrated 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” on the small but steady ways that an individual can undermine the complex machinery of a repressive state.

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