Language: Haitian Creole

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2019

Explore the Winter 2019 issue with our section editors!

Not sure where to start with the brand new Winter 2019 issue of Asymptote? At 35 countries represented, this issue is our most diverse yet, and marks the eighth anniversary of Asymptote. Here, our Section Editors recommend some of their favourite pieces from their respective sections.

The writing of María Sánchez tracks close to the ground; she hunts experience. In “The Next Word,” compellingly translated by Bella Bosworth, we accompany Sánchez in her truck, as she drives around the Spanish countryside, working as a field veterinarian. There is a great slowness to her prose, born of hours of careful observation of people and things. The letters that composed this piece read like prayers, written to an unknown God, in praise of those small moments in which, as Sánchez writes, “life stands still and nothing happens.” There is a delicate empiricism at work here—an empathy with the world and its rhythms that Sánchez reads by looking at her, as if she were the geiger counter of existence. “Sometimes”, she writes, quoting Gabriella Ybarra, “imagining has been the only option I have had to try to understand.”

— Joshua Craze, Nonfiction Editor

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An Interview with 2017’s Neustadt International Prize Winner Edwidge Danticat

Even when we are not writing about death, we are in some way writing about it.

In a riveting interview with the world-renowned writer Edwidge Danticat—announced just yesterday as next year’s recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature or the “American Nobel”—Romie Desrogéne poses incisive questions about life and death, and how art attempts to make sense of them. Danticat’s works have earned her a long list of awards and have been translated into numerous languages including French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Swedish. Her most recent novel, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, was released via Graywolf Press this past July.

Edwidge Danticat’s work creates spheres where the natural and the supernatural, the “isit” (here) and the “lòt bò” (elsewhere), the evil and the good, the historical and the fictional, the personal and the political, are in perpetual contention and symbiosis.

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