Language: French

Desire and Possession: A Review of Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust

October 9, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

Proust saw glittering Parisian dinners and costume balls as “great massacres.” His society models posed for him and were in turn “devoured” by him.

Zombie Proust by Jérôme Prieur, translated by Nancy Kline, Les Fugitives, 2025

 “Marcel Proust was never filmed at all,” asserts Jérôme Prieur in Proust fantôme, his 2006 French text rendered into English by Nancy Kline in 2025 as Zombie Proust. In 2017, however, a Canadian professor claimed that he had found Proust’s moving specter in the silent footage of Countess Élaine Greffulhe’s 1904 wedding to the Duke de Guiche. Entering the frame about 35 seconds in, Proust, or his mustasched double, wearing a pearl-gray overcoat, black vest, and black bowler hat, looking somewhat less formal than the other guests and in a hurry, descends the stairs, overtakes some older folks, and exits the frame.

The discovery of this possible Proust, occuring in the interval between Prieur’s originally published text and its translation, seems to be especially meta. Whenever we talk about Proust and his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, there exists always a splintering tension between chronological and subjective recollections, motion and stillness, analogous to the temporal, spatial, and linguistic gaps between an original text and its translation. In short, there are many ways to interpret Prieur’s statement that Proust “was never filmed,” just as there are many ways to read Zombie Proust.  READ MORE…

Collateral Damage: A Review of Return by Raharimanana

October 6, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Shaiq Ali

What would the symbols of the new nation be? Its language, its idioms, its tribes? And more, importantly, who isn’t Malagasy?

Return by Raharimanana, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette, Seagull Books, 2025

A newly independent nation. The visions of building. The sacrifices, people, losses. If this invigorating spirit is unwaveringly intoxicating, its effects are as much generational as they manifest in the present. In his novel Return, Raharimanana knits together a young man’s memories of his father and the spirituous strides taken to uphold truth against power in the aftermath of colonialism—specifically when the nascent country of Madagascar erupted in revolution in 1972 after gaining independence from the French in 1960. Hira, around whom much of the story revolves, is hailed as an oscillatory reminder of the time since Madagascar’s freedom, forming an autobiographical arc in Raharimanana’s own reconciliation with his childhood. The author’s writing also carries the artfulness of music, an art that he engages in alongside being a novelist, poet, and playwright.

In an earlier book, Nour 1947 (2001), Raharimanana penned a closer engagement with the 1947 Malagasy Uprising, dealing with the deadly killings of 87,000 Malagasys by the French colonial rule. Return, which was first published in 2018 in French as Revenir, now puts on a vivid image of Hira’s life as a touring writer and his recollections of the transitioning state of Madagascar. As he travels, he is disturbingly reminded of his father’s torture and the price paid by his family, and these fragmented recollections do not let him collate a neat history. Hence, the sections of the present are reeling with the irredeemability of time, a fracturedness that also speaks to the inability to write of a violence that is both collective and overpowering. As the novel moves on, this position culminates into renewed impetus for his writing, rife with image and poetic terseness. Being born after independence, Hira is part of a nation attempting to blossom a life out of the ruins—and this is true for Hira’s own family as well as for the country. For him, it is tiring: “But also weariness. He’d had enough of all of that. Being confronted with his country’s violence.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 3, 2025  |  in News, Weekly Roundup  |  by MARGENTO, Sofija Popovska, and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from Spain, Belgium, North Macedonia, and India!

This week, our editors-at-large give us a window into discussions about the importance of literature in translation across cultures—as something that connects people, responds to disaster, and creates community. Read on to find out more about a conference in India, one in the Balkans, new poems and essay collections, and more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain and Belgium

Asymptote contributor Felix Nicolau translated a selection of poems by the Spanish poet Fulgencio Martinez for the latest issue of the Romanian journal Apostrof. Martinez visited the Romanian Language and Culture Centre (led by Nicolau) at University of Granada back in June which triggered a fruitful international conversation. Nicolau’s exquisite renditions bring witness to the Spanish poet’s vision of the lyric as both a haven from and a look into the world’s (and “any world’s”) political turmoil and injustice. Serendipitously, these translations speak to another groundbreaking event in the other literature I follow closely; the Belgian one.

The most remarkable recent event in Belgian Francophone letters is the release of Myriam Watthee-Delmotte’s collection of essays La littérature, une réponse au désastre (Literature, Response to Disaster) from Royal Academy of Belgium’s press. The internationally-awarded academic, writer, and essayist’s book has already received impressive coverage in Belgium and beyond. Watthee-Delmotte has also recently launched a novel, Indemne. Où va Moby-Dick? (Safe and Sound: Where’s Moby-Dick Headed?) with Actes Sud) and the two books are the subject of a two-episode interview podcast on Radio France Culture and also a streaming broadcast on for two weeks in a row (September 10th through the 25th). READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2025

September 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” READ MORE…

“Swarms touch the text where thought burns”: An Interview with Aiden Farrell on Translating The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes           

September 10, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

The text is as bodily as the body is textual, their respective functions included.

The Vitals, written by Marie de Quatrebarbes and translated from the French by Aiden Farrell, examines the chasm of loss and desire to “conjugate the moments outside of me, spent so far from you, with this distance that is ‘I see’ and you who are ‘so far from me.’” Written in lyrical, diaristic fragments that take place between July and December, the poems certify de Quatrebarbes as a master of the short prose poetry form, which she imagines as nestled matryoshka dolls. Each poem is titled with the day of the month as the speaker lives her life and thoughts intrude. “Say again, do mourners have a singular?” asks de Quatrebarbes, as she lives and re-lives: “The day of his departure–the eye simply wanted to take stock.”

Farrell’s English translation is a deft reflection of the poet’s angular and defamiliarizing experiments with syntax, discontinuity, and memory; in this interview, I spoke with him on the ongoing process of translational work, its intersections with his personal writing, and the ways in which de Quartrebarbes subverts language.

Tiffany Troy (TT): What is the act of literary translation to you?

Aiden Farrell (AF): I like that you’ve framed literary translation as an act, because that’s exactly what it is, and any definition that tries to go beyond the action of translation has to be taken with a grain of salt—which is to say that translation is nothing if not a process, necessarily changing from project to project and from translator to translator.

A writing practice necessitates a reading practice; translation is both at the same time, and also not exactly, because when I’m reading to translate I’m not reading as I otherwise would, and when I’m writing my translation I’m not writing as I otherwise would, but I’m still doing both. To varying degrees, every poem I read asks me to reinvent the way I read poetry, and calls attention to my standards for reading, and then also for writing. The same goes for translating—I have to reinvent, surrender just enough of my instincts that I can be open to receiving what the original poem is giving me, but also hold on just enough that I can respond accordingly. I have to disappear so as to appear, only a second later. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2025

August 11, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eric Bies, Justin Goodman, Mathilde Hjertholm Nielsen, and Xiao Yue Shan

The latest from Palestine, France, Germany, Brazil, Italy, Bulgaria, Japan, Canada, Cuba, Argentina, Slovakia, and China!

This month’s round-up of newly released titles spans twelve titles across twelve countries. We’ve got a profound and lucid collection compiled of diaries from the genocide in Gaza; a readdressing of womanly sacrifice in the domestic realm; an Argentinian novel reinventing the history of Italy’s famed “Park of the Monsters”; the long-awaited esoteric and experimental tome from German writer Michael Lentz; essays and textual riches from the father of surrealism; and much, much more. . .

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Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Nahil Mohana, Sondos Sabra, Ala’a Obaid, and Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Basma Ghalayini and Ayah Najadat, Comma Press, 2025

Review by Justin Goodman

Similar to the intimate testimonies of Atef Abu Said’s Don’t Look Left and Plestia Alaqad’s The Eyes of Gaza, Voices of Resistance compiles the diaries of four Gazan women, tracing their thoughts as they mourn their martyred, fear their decimation, celebrate the Palestinian people, and sacrifice meals for the sake of birthday pastries. Together, Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana, and Ala’a Obaid highlight what Gillian Slovo describes in her introduction as both a beauty “in [their] honesty and spirit” and a horror as they gain “a whole new vocabulary for describing the sounds of different bombs.” This latter is compiled by Mohana in a list running half a page long, as she distinguishes the subtleties between “Bouf” (aerial bombing) and “Dddof” (artillery shelling). Most importantly, however, she adds: “. . . we have begun to lose our hearing.”

READ MORE…

Summer 2025: Highlights from the Team

August 4, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Our bountiful Summer 2025 edition is filled with gems—as these highlights from our team show!

I have complicated feelings about Carolina Brown’s “Anthropocene” (tr. Jessica Powell). The brevity it accords its narrator’s transness is alternately touching and maddening, the fatphobia is at once completely spot-on for such a self-loathing narrator and at the same time it is pretty dehumanizing‚ but, ultimately, all that falls away in the ravaged face of a one-armed zombie jogging across the post climate-change Antarctic wasteland. A wonderful sci-fi tale.

I’d love Syaman Rapongan’s Eyes of an Ocean (tr. Darryl Sterk) for the title alone, but fortunately, Rapongan seems like a strong contender for the title of the actual most-interesting-man-in-the-world. His play with words, his treatment of colonization and indigeneity, the kindness with which he talks about younger generations. I really needed to read something like this, after all the ugliness that’s been going on in my own country.

I love the gender-bender secret agent in Valentinas Klimašauskas’s Polygon (tr. Erika Lastovskytė) so freaking much. The concluding discussion of airplane spotters is a particular stand-out for its treatment of how individuals become conscious of their political power.

Refugees are human beings. Where Rodrigo Urquiola Flores’ “La Venezolana” (tr. Shaina Brassard) shines is in its steadfast refusal either to vilify or idealize them, to present them in all their messy humanity, and in its willingness to show how shameful the narrator’s behavior towards them.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

Emmanuelle Sapin’s story “A Child Is Stolen” (tr. Michelle Kiefer) starts off with a swift, telling punch to the gut and builds from there.

Ahmad Shamlou’s poems in Niloufar Talebi’s lilting translation hover in waves of emotion and radiance: “Give me mirrors and eager moths, / light and wine…”

With playfulness and insight, Katia Grubisic sharpens the discussion about AI and translation by focusing on error in her piece “The Authority of Error”: “My argument is that AI makes the wrong kind of mistakes.  Mistakes breed resilience, and, most importantly, humility.”

Fawwaz Taboulsi, in Yasmine Zohdi’s translation, steers us directly into the sadness of Lebanon, 1982, and the time of the Siege of Beirut. His grief speaks with lucidity: “And, ever so slowly, the departing fighters peel away from the grasping, waving hands and from the embracing arms. Like skin peeling off its own flesh. They peel away from the farewells. From the prayers. From the promises.”

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how writers build characters. Jana Putrle Srdić’s poem “End of the world, beginning” in Katia Zakrajšek’s translation, does this in striking ways: ” Sitting on a warm rock, scratching in the wind, / you are a monkey, a branch with ants filing along it, debris in the air, / spots of flickering light”

—Ellen Elias-Bursać, Contributing Editor READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2025

July 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Jason Gordy Walker, Jordan Silversmith, and Kaelie Giffel

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

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Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

Ukraine’s Linguistic Front: A Review of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns by Artem Chapeye

July 9, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sam Bowden

By focusing on the ambiguity of his new life at war, Chapeye resists Russia’s invasion on a psychological level.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins, Penguin Random House, April 2025

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, Ukrainian writers have brought the resistance into their language. Some who once worked in Russian have switched to Ukrainian; others stopped capitalizing the invader’s name, rendering it as puny russia (росія). This is about reducing Russia, ejecting it from a language it has tried to claim as its own, as if in anticipation of Moscow’s physical expulsion. In his latest book—equal parts memoir, treatise, and document of the first three years of the invasion—Artem Chapeye rejects not only Russia, but the cruel logic of war. Throughout Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, Russia—and the grief, fear, uncertainty, guilt, and shame its war brought upon Ukrainians—is referred to as “Gloom.” It is Gloom that encroaches upon Ukraine, Gloom against which Chapeye, who joined the military shortly after Russia invaded, takes up arms alongside his countrymen. Gloom is both Russia’s literal tanks and missiles and the psychological conditions Russia’s invasion forces upon Chapeye—at once the monster and the terror it inspires. Yet Ordinary People does more than chase Russia from its language. Chapeye, rendered in affable English by Zenia Tompkins, resists the affect of war itself. Through Tompkins’s frank translation, which favors a colloquial, musing style, Chapeye remains irrepressibly human as Gloom tries to change him. The result is a surprisingly warm and compelling text that insists on rising above Russia’s war, even as it acknowledges the urgency of the real-world struggle to end it. READ MORE…

Portrait of a Faceless Man Without a Country: A Review of Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti

June 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander

Alparegho disarms its readers with a forceful and muscular language that tenderly rips through.

Alparegho, Like-nothing-else by Hélène Sanguinetti, translated from the French by Ann Cefola, Beautiful Days Press, 2025

Today is the day! “It’s today, / great day! / Let’s shake sheets out / the windows, / smash panes and  / replace them, / empty drawers, pockets, / shelves. / Great day!” Hélène Sanguinetti’s collection, Alparegho, Like-nothing-else breaks through walls, those we erect with mortar and brick as well as the more insidious ones we draw in our minds and on the Earth. Through Ann Cefola’s translation, Alparegho effortlessly draws readers into a patchwork of vignettes that question the solidity of home and country, suggesting that these supposedly immutable objects are heavy burdens; we would be better off leaving them by the wayside. In seven chapters, the poet increasingly brings to bear the oppressive characters of the nation-state and the domestic sphere, shattering their hegemony in a sweeping motion that sweeps her readers from one scene, one place to another, looping us back and around.

Sanguinetti’s long poetic career has exhibited a practice that moves between polyphony and plasticity, and the resultant sense of vertigo disorients the internal compass as one move forward through this collection, which incorporates elements of fables, dreams, and songs to disenchant its readers from the sorcery of capitalism and authoritarianism. Alparegho opens with a potent symbol of the weight of home on our backs: a snail creeps through the dark of the night of the house, leaving a trail of slime. From there, the author slyly and gradually suggests that the rooms of the house, or the lands of the king, are interchangeable squares on a chessboard, abstract concepts just as much as lived environments. Here, home is neither comfortable nor cozy, but a rotting mess, slowly caving in. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: An Excerpt from Riversong by Wendy Delorme

June 24, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Kathryn Raver

I seek only those flammable things from which a story might be made.

Ever kept a secret way longer than you thought you would? A year? Two? What about seven? In this novel excerpt from French author Wendy Delorme, brilliantly translated by Asymptote’s own Kathryn Raver, a story of a love unspoken becomes a story about the nature of literature itself, and the parallels between writing and self-creation. Isolated in a mountain cabin, an unnamed writer reflects back on the years leading up to their relationship with their now-lover. At first hesitant to confess her feelings, she instead watches her friend’s gender transition unfold over the course of several years, only to find that as their voice and appearance change, her feelings for them deepen. When, after a an encounter on a rainy night, her feelings finally come to light, it sparks an epistolary conversation that will change both their lives. Read on!

A restless night. Sleep escapes me, but the words don’t come either. What does come is the thought of writing to you. I’m thinking again of how we met. How we really met. That night where I knew I wanted you.

Sometimes, a person comes along and we see them. Truly see them, I mean. Our perspective changes. Our line of sight suddenly sharpens, like that of an animal scrutinizing the brush to see what moves within. Our retinae focus, taking in details that up until that point had blurred together into a hazy landscape. The eye becomes curious and searches for more, latches onto a mouth, the clean line of an eyebrow, the velvety texture of a cheek, a shoulder muscle, a manner of smiling. This sort of gaze, when it lands on another, radically changes the bond two people share.

What turned my gaze on its head, that night? READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2025

June 16, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan, Eva Dunsky, Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Iran, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Mexico, Japan, France, Finland, Sweden, China, and Italy!

This month, we’re delighted to be bringing twelve brilliant titles from eleven different countries. Find here the novelization of a famous chess match that reveals the greater geopolitical game playing us all; a summery fiction that melds the structures of nature and human architecture; a poetry collection rendering tender portraits of working-class women; a lyrical rewriting of a remarkable nun-turned-conquistador’s New World adventures; and so much more.

oblivion

Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran, edited by Nahid Ahmadian and Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, translated from the Persian by Nahid Ahmadian, Ali-Reza Mirsajadi, and Hesam Sharifian, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Henry Gifford

In order, the five plays included in Oblivion: and Other Plays from Post-revolutionary Iran are set in Arabia in the fifth century AD (The Sacrifice of Senemar by Bahram Beyzaie); China in the second century BC (Oblivion by Hamid Amjad); Spain in the twentieth century (Dance of Mares by Mohammad Charmshir); somewhere (per stage directions and blank spaces left in the dialogue) in the city you’re in, on the day you’re reading it (The Child by Naghmeh Samini); and a laundromat in Los Angeles at three in the morning (Bird of Dawn by Sepideh Khosrowjah). Their narratives are of a hubristic yet indecisive king and his palace; imperial bloodshed and familial betrayal; sex and mariticide; an infant born on a migrant raft, protected at the border by three women who all deny being his mother; and three generations of Iranian immigrants, each with romantic trouble and divided identities. Some are epic, and others are everyday. None of them are set in ancient Persia or modern Iran, and only the first and last are explicitly about Persians or Iranians.

Yet these are, in fact, plays from the same country over the same quarter-century, from 1995 to 2019. The diversity of their settings and scale is a wise editorial decision intended to highlight the diversity of theater in Iran, but it also reflects a practical need of addressing contemporary, local problems obliquely under a censorship regime. What is more interesting is the collection’s consistency, and in particular the nonchronological approach taken within almost all of the plays. Oblivion, for example, begins with two siblings going to meet their adoptive brother after years apart; the encounter then extends over the course of the play as a frame to the story of their lives and their parents’, acted out in shadows on a scrim behind them. The formal blending extends this sense of collapsed time; as the editors’ introduction explains in great detail, shadow puppetry (khayāl-bāzi) is an old Persian form, here embedded within a more modern, European-inflected mode. The other plays are similarly mixed—traditional aspects and motifs cohering with contemporary themes and styles.

Every nation has history, but I wonder, reading the plays of Oblivion, if there is something about Iran—a young nation of an ancient culture—that has made its past more palpable, fraught, and vividly present. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 16, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and Zohra Salih

The latest from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors are introducing a generous new anthology that illuminates India’s capital, the winners of prestigious Swedish literary awards, and a feature of Hong Kong poets. Read on to find out more.

Zohra Salih, Editor at Large, reporting from India

It has been a harrowing week in this part of the world. We are still, very cautiously, coming to terms with the ceasefire that was finally declared to de-escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, the consequences of which have been disproportionately and brutally borne by the residents of occupied Kashmir (one of the most militarized zones in the world). Things are now supposedly returning to ‘normal’, yet the fact that war was blatantly invoked, justified, and celebrated by fellow citizens has created an atmosphere of unease around writing about India in its aftermath, to say the least.

If he were alive today, one person would have found the words to make something meaningful and urgent amidst this fog of madness: Saadat Hasan Manto. Born in India and forced to make a second life in the newly formed Pakistan, the fiery writer and chronicler of Bombay was considered prophetic for his stories that anticipated with stark-eyed clarity the savagery awaiting the two nations post-Partition, a decision he vehemently opposed. May 11 is the 113th anniversary of his birth, and there is no better time to return to his short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, or his collection Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, than now. Those in Mumbai have also been able to experience his stories—many of them excluded from the usual anthologies—as part of an audio theatre piece performed by Katha Khana at the iconic Prithvi theatre on May 13.

I would also be remiss to not mention The World With Its Mouth Open by another journalist turned author, Zahid Rafiq, which came out in December last year. Rafiq’s debut short story collection vividly and humanely renders the lives of the people of Kashmir as they go on with what has come to be called ordinary life, marked by precarity. There is a quietness to the writing that allows Rafiq to enter your mind and transport it to the valley, blocking out all the noise that obscures its image in the mainstream imagination. Needless to say, it is essential reading for the times we are living in today. READ MORE…

Dichotomies of Love: A Review of Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa

May 14, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Matthew Snider

Taïa writes of the physicality and torture of love, alongside larger questions of agency and resistance.

 Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the Arabic by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories Press, 2025

Nearly halfway through Living in Your Light, the narrator, Malika, plainly states: “Survival doesn’t make us into better people.” Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel tells the story of this survival in three parts, ranging from 1954 to 1999, showing us the endurance of his protagonist through rejection, death, love, and loss—but also her gradual hardening. When Malika makes the above statement to her daughter, Khadija, she’s already recognized that life has made her more severe than the young woman who falls in love in the novel’s opening.

Malika is a complex narrator, at times honest with herself and at other times stubborn, and Taïa clearly designates her as representing his own mother, M’Barka. The author has written on his mother in previous works, but has never explored her motivations, her character, or her complications so intimately. In his collection of short stories, Another Morocco, he writes: “M’Barka and I love each other, with much more than the love between a mother and son,” and has said elsewhere that his favorite word is M’Barka. However, their relationship is complicated, and Living in Your Light is plainly Taïa’s way of deciphering and honoring his mother’s journey.

Thus, Living in Your Light is one of Taïa’s most impressive works to date for its ability to tightly capture the struggles of a woman’s independence in Morocco, headed by Malika’s determination to control her own life, and continually thwarted by the forces of poverty, war, and colonization. Throughout the novel, Taïa writes of the physicality and torture of love, alongside larger questions of agency and resistance. READ MORE…