Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Safe Corridor by Jan Dost

August 28, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Amidst Safe Corridor’s war, the child has become the historian, recording what adults try to forget.

“Children,” Jan Dost tells us, “grow up quickly in wars.” In his bold and unflinching Safe Corridor, the author demonstrates this brutal reality through the eyes of a young narrator caught within Syria’s civil conflict, resulting in a phantasmagorical, gripping account that not only captures the violent facts, but also the mind’s attempts to accept them. As Dost moves seamlessly between the surreal, the absurd, the tragic, and the enraging, the novel engages with the true consequences and aftermaths of loss: who—or what—one becomes after surviving the unthinkable.

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. 

Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, DarArab, 2025

“On the evening when young Kamiran began to realise that he was turning into a lump of chalk, rain was bucketing down.” With this devastatingly surreal image, Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor—gracefully translated by Marilyn Booth—immerses its readers in a scene that brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A Syrian-Kurdish writer-translator based in Germany, Dost is one of Syria’s most important living authors with sixteen novels to his name, most of which center the realities and consequences of his home nation’s civil war. Safe Corridor, originally published in Arabic in 2019 as Mamar Āmin, entrusts this testimony of a devastated country to a voice least equipped—and yet most fated—to bear it. Told through a fragile, furious, and often surreal narration, the novel captures how war is not only fought on battlefields but also inscribed upon the bodies and imaginations of children. As the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish puts it in his poem “The War Will End”:

I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.

Roland Gary, in his introduction to Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, states that the Czech writer’s work “belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century . . . because his sense of man’s fate is deeply bound up with the atrocities and nightmares of the age.” Similar atrocities have persisted into our own century, ensuring that Kafka’s worlds remain an enduring source of inspiration for many writers worldwide—especially Arab novelists. They are the worlds of the absurd, marked by estrangement and fear, wherein one is perpetually hounded by unseen forces they cannot name, condemned to live within utter futility. READ MORE…

A Marred and Martyred Language: An Interview with Ahmad Almallah on Writing from the Borderlands

August 27, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

For you to understand poetry, you must see the human action it reflects and the one that gave it form on the page.

Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s second collection, Border Wisdom, is a searing love song of longing, memory, and language. It is a heart-wrenching evocation of the poet’s mother, Nawal, and of the poet’s own identity, familial lineage, and their occupied homeland. Woven with epigraphs from Ahmad Shawqi and Emily Dickinson, the collection propels itself smoothly between English and Arabic with erasure poetry, Arabic khatt, shape-poems, and English prose that chart the poet’s topographies of Philadelphia, Beirut, Vermont, and Bethlehem, along with the reimagined terrain of his mother’s Amman and al-Khalil. 

Border Wisdom pulsates with the poet’s estrangements: from his home, from his father, from the contours of his own memory. And echoing through as though an aftershock is a disclosure from the book’s last few pages: “Dear reader, I’ve been pretending all along to have a second language. Actually/in reality/basically/essentially/ I don’t know anything in Arabic.” 

In this conversation, I spoke with Dr. Almallah about Border Wisdom, mistranslations, and his labyrinthine poetics of negotiation between Arabic and English.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Your second poetry collection, Border Wisdom, was published by Winter Editions in 2023. How did the poems in this collection come together over time? And what has the experience of sharing this work with the world been like for you?

Ahmad Almallah (AA): The poems began to come together before and after my mother’s disappearance from this world. The world of borders did not allow me to be by her side in her final hours. It was in 2021; I was trying to be there for her but the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) launched a large operation to quell protests over kicking people out of their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza ended up being hit the hardest as Israel was flexing its military power on innocent Palestinians as has been for seventy-seven years now.

At that point, I chose to leave the West Bank to be with my family in the US. A week after that I got news that my mother was no longer of the living. I was advised not to go back. I found myself flipping through the poems of Emily Dickinson and I happened on the line “there is a finished feeling at the grave.” It was then that I decided to go back to Palestine. The first thing that came to my mind when I walked into the room where my mother spent the final days of her life was that she was not dead. She had just disappeared. And the same thought stayed with me when I visited her grave. I wasn’t there to witness her body put in the ground. This is when I began to hold onto the idea of disappearance as an alternative to death. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain by Wilhelm Genazino

August 26, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Charlie N. Zaharoff

A look delivers the quickest verdict; its production requires no more than a second’s time.

“What do you do when you can’t manage to write a book? I’ll tell you: You make little notes, observations, anecdotes, sketch individual scenes. And then? You piece them together indiscriminately.” Thus wrote one irate critic of the Stain, the Jacket, the Rooms, the Pain—but they were wrong.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Wilhelm Genazino‘s mid-career masterpiece, translated from the German by Charlie N. Zaharoff. Here, the superficially aimless wanderings of our unnamed protagonist give way to a complex pattern of references and emotional resonances, his catalogue of observations accumulating into a vivid psychological portrait. What results is not a traditional dramatic novel, but rather, a powerful meditation on memory and loss. On the process of choosing an excerpt, the translator writes: “I had to make peace with the fact that I was doing a sort of violence to the text by snipping threads—visible or invisible—where they were not meant to be snipped. It felt worth it to give readers a sample of Genazino’s work, which with the exception of one novel remains untranslated into English.” Read on!

I step into the Rialto, the second-largest Italian café in town, and take a spot at the long counter, which reaches from the depths of the room up to the glass doors in front. I ask for an espresso and the telephone and dial Gesa’s number, although I’ll hardly say a word to her. The call is just a pretense. Gesa picks up. I say: I’m in the Rialto, do you want to hear Italy? She says: Yes. Then I am silent and hold the receiver towards the counter. From time to time, when she is sitting alone in her room, Gesa wants to be interrupted by the sounds of an Italian bar. She loves the quick setting of espresso dishes on the glass counter, the clacking of cups on the saucers, the laying of spoons beside the full cups, the snapping of the ice-cream scoop, the light sputter of the fruit press, the skating back-and-forth of metal ice-cream bowls on the counter, the pressure of freshly uncapped bottles, the opening and closing of heavy fridge doors, the clicking of ice cubes in slender glasses, the impact of a bottle opener on a marble slab, the hissing of the espresso machine, the dumping of coffee grounds into wooden trash bins. This is what she wants to hear: the sound of a more distant life that infiltrates her own for one minute, like a promise. After a while I ask: Is it good? Yes, it is good. Gesa laughs, and from her laugh you can tell that her life has rotated once around itself. I say: See you later. We hang up, I give back the telephone, pay and go.

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Nostalgia and Aesthetic Inertia: A Review of The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko

August 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

The Last Soviet Artist compels readers to take note, to research, and to reflect. . .

The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, n+1 Books, 2025

The title of this review is part borrowed from, and part inspired by a subsection of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. A meditation that concerns itself with the capacious titular affect, Boym studies nostalgia through the revolutionary era of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and well into the present. While she categorizes two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective—the former more active, seeking to reconstruct the past, and the latter passive, dwelling in yearning—she caveats that these are only “tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” While reading Victoria Lomasko’s The Last Soviet Artist, a third degree of nostalgia emerges: the residual. Nostalgia’s escape from the decay of romanticization towards a productive politic of collective and self-exploration feeds the heart of the text. 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, Lomasko’s latest—a graphic reportage that blends elements of memoir—was initially planned as a sequel to her Other Russias, which she mentions in her introduction. I hold a particular reverence for introductions; these precise portals often reveal more of the author’s motivations than is written on the surface, and Lomasko’s is particularly transparent. There is an urgency—we learn that Lomasko has self-exiled in response to Russia’s iron grip of heavy censorship and repression. In her home country, there is no room for imagination, no space for artists, and social activism has been systematically stifled. This realization dispels the awe Lomasko had held for “those fairytale pictures and stories” that she grew up reading about an everlasting friendship among the fifteen Soviet republics. Any remaining traces of nostalgia for “that period” soon erode away when Lomasko, seeking photocopies of her work clandestinely at a museum in Belarus, realizes that her body remembered what it “had really meant to be a Soviet person.” 

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 22, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by MARGENTO and Sayani Sarkar

The latest literary news from Romania and India!

This week, our editors-at-large introduce us to transnational literary communities and newly-translated classic literature. From experimental poetry festivals to reading recommendations in contemplation of the 79th anniversary of India’s independence, read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

Indefatigable Florin Dan Prodan—just back from Egypt where he co-organized the performance poetry festival & interdisciplinary colloquium Interwoven Voices, and on his way to co-organizing a writing residency and poetry-and-music festival in Annapurna National Park (in Nepal’s Himalayas) and Pokhara City—threw a poetry festival in his home, northern Romania. Via Poetica, which ran from August 10th through the 14th, kicked off in the cultural hub and university city of Iasi and featured established names such as Radu Andriescu and Prodan himself alongside remarkable alternative voices such as past Asymptote contributor Simona Nastac, experimental novelist Paul Mihalache, and the lyrically contemplative Luminița Amarie. While the roster of performance poets slightly varied as the festival moved from Iasi to Prodan’s hometown of Suceava to the UNESCO-heritage medieval Voroneț monastery, a mainstay was the experimental avantgarde electronic music of Ranter’s Bay that has already resounded across Europe and beyond.

Special mention should be made of two genuinely experimental poets that were featured on every single night of the festival, whose inclusion contributed significantly to the festival’s international profile. Rhys Trimble, a Zambian-born Welsh poet, recently joined Prodan and the Zidul de Hartie (Paper Wall) collective’s initiatives, participating in both Interwoven Voices in Cairo, and now, Via Poetica in Romania. Trimble does bilingual work in Welsh and English and is strongly active as an improvisational performance and installation artist, musician, visual poet, and interdisciplinary-poetics academic. Another Welsh poet, David Greenslade, has split his time between Wales and Romania for a few years now, after traveling the world as an English teacher. He writes in both English and Welsh while experimenting (and performing) with “used and usable material objects” such as diagrams, tools, vegetables, and signs, and creatively engaging with visual and aural pareidolia (pattern-seeking misperceptions).   READ MORE…

The Poetics of Fatherhood: A Conversation with Robin Myers on Translating Andrés Neuman’s A Father Is Born

August 21, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

[P]reservation in translation is a conversation, opening the work to new and unexpected places.

Andrés Neuman’s A Father Is Born, translated with delicate precision by Robin Myers, is a quietly powerful meditation on fatherhood, language, and identity. This slender volume delicately weaves poetic vignettes and prose reflections, capturing the intimate transformation of becoming a parent, and Myers, having worked on the translation during her own pregnancy, brings an empathetic awareness to the text’s subtle rhythms and linguistic surprises. The dialogue also touches on linguistic shifts, cultural inheritance, and the vibrant literary ‎scenes of Buenos Aires and Mexico City—culminating in a tender exploration of voice, translation, and the evolving nature of home.

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. 

Maddy Robinson (MR): The book is such a quietly beautiful collection of aphorisms, blending poetry and prose to explore the experience of fatherhood. When you’re tasked with finding a narrative voice so closely aligned with the author’s own, how does that compare to translating fiction?

Robin Myers (RM): That’s a wonderful question. Having worked with both life writing and fiction, I honestly don’t feel there’s a huge difference. What matters most is paying close attention to what the language is doing on the page—trying to understand and honor the author’s choices.

For this particular book, it falls along a spectrum of Andrés’s styles. I’ve had the honor of translating his work before—both his early novel Bariloche, which he wrote at a very young age, and also a book of his poetry. What I find remarkable about A Father Is Born is how it combines his novelistic sensibility with the precision of poetry; there’s something about the spareness and distilled quality of this book that I also find in his fiction. The voice emerges from those deliberate decisions.

The text is elliptical, presenting quick vignette-like scenes, from the interior world of preparing for fatherhood to welcoming the child, and the intensity of early parenthood. It also beautifully captures the child’s formation and psyche. It was important for me to attend to the imagery and the surprising, somewhat unconventional sentence structures Andrés uses—which are rarely predictable. Translating this invited me to stay alert to that strangeness in his sentences.

The book is deeply earnest but also includes humor, sometimes self-deprecating. I also tried to retain those moments with their original oddness in English.

MR: As a reader, one of the remarkable things about books like this is how we experience them differently depending on where we are in life. I think the same is true of translation: a book arrives at a time in your life when you least expect it. I happen to know that this book found you at a very fitting moment in your life. Could you talk about that a bit? READ MORE…

Possibilities in Transformation: A Review of Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová

August 20, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Garrett Biggs

[Ceilings] and its setting dwell in a place where play and terror occur simultaneously. . .

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická, Twisted Spoon Press, 2025

In “The Aleph,” Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous narrator attempts to describe the titular object—a point in space that contains all other points—but finally articulates that he cannot truly do so: “Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south . . . Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction.” Borges is far from the only writer to fear that fiction might distort truth or one’s simple lived experience. In the way of Barthes, who wrote that “incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order,” Borges’s attempt to translate the aleph functions as a useful thought experiment: How does one coherently translate an experience or text that is fundamentally incoherent? Should one even try?

Ceilings, Zuzana Brabcová’s second novel to be posthumously translated into English, represents an aleph of sorts. It is about a woman named Emička (or Ema) who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, but it is also about Emička’s imaginary brother, Ash, who is committed to the same hospital—because he both is and is not Ema herself. As for the hospital, it’s certainly a hospital, but it also shapeshifts to become an aquarium, Ema’s childhood home, and an IKEA. Plenty of readers will take the easy route and try to interpret these inconsistencies as reflections of Ema’s unstable mental state, but Brabcová disrupts this reading by refusing to settle on a clear narrator. She shifts between the third person and Ema’s/Ash’s perspective, sometimes all within a single paragraph. Thus, while perhaps not as untranslatable as the aleph, Ceilings provides no shortage of challenges: its circuitous syntax, its treatment of time, its slippery subject matter. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Short Stories from Sudan

August 19, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Essam M. Al-Jassim

“They’re not heart defects,” I desperately replied. “But my heart, always in exile, has taken the shape of my homeland.”

For this Translation Tuesday, we’re thrilled to present two very short stories by Sudanese writers Fatimah El Senussi and Wedd Alwakeel Maarouf. Both stories use a minimum of words to depict meaningful moments. In “Expatriate”, a routine doctor’s visit becomes a lens through which conventional ideas of pathology are questioned. The story deftly explores the struggles of immigrants navigating healthcare systems where their unique challenges are often misunderstood or ignored. In “A Machiavellian Mind”, a bartender’s long-nursed inner ambitions clash with the reality of his mundane job; with sharp wit, the story playfully subverts alarmist narratives about Islamic fundamentalism and its perceived threat to Western civilization. Translated from Arabic by Essam M. Al-Jassim, both pieces shine with a pithy, humorous, and deeply emotive voice.

Expatriate
by Fatimah El Senussi

In a distant land, the cardiologist closely scrutinized the X-ray of my heart. In a low, disturbed tone, he said, “You have congenital heart defects.”

“They’re not heart defects,” I desperately replied. “But my heart, always in exile, has taken the shape of my homeland.”

The doctor, initially stunned, sat down to diligently examine the map.

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To Keep the Shimmer Alive: A Review of The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern

August 18, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Silversmith

To read The Gallows Songs now is to reclaim vision from algorithmic sameness, to practice freedom . . . as an event within language.

The Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, translated from the German by Max Knight, introduction by Samuel Titan, New York Review Books, 2025

Christian Morgenstern’s name itself opens a door. The significance of his first name is clear enough, but it is his last—German for “morning star”—that bears the promise of light before knowledge, of awareness before the world hardens into habit. In The Gallows Songs, newly reissued by NYRB Poets in Max Knight’s classic 1963 translation, Morgenstern uses that dawn brightness to keep language—and thus perception—from calcifying, with a celebrated nonsense that is less escapist whimsy than a disciplined refusal of routine. At the heart of The Gallows Songs lies a paradox: it is the crimson thread holding the hanged man to the gallows pole, at once constraining and liberating, that gave Morgenstern permission to see the world as a new thing, with the freshness of something that will not be seen again. Laughing on the edge of death, Morgenstern turns the gallows itself into a perch to witness the world anew. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 15, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, Mary Noorlander, and Wambua Muindi

The latest in literary updates from the Philippines, the United States, and Kenya!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us around the world for updates on the world’s literary scenes. From a celebration of Philippine literature in South Korea, to a night of poetry reading in the United States and the first Kenyan author to sit on the panel of judges for the International Booker Prize, read on to learn more!

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

For years, the depth of Philippine literature remained an unchartered territory for Korean readership. Now, a devoted cultural undertaking is bridging that gap, bringing the works of two celebrated Filipino writers­—National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin and award-winning novelist Mica De Leon—to bookshelves across South Korea.

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Bringing Contemporary Turkish Poetry into English: A Conversation with Buğra Giritlioğlu and Daniel Scher

August 14, 2025  |  in Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Even when poetry is read silently, we tend to subvocalize. Rhythm—and even a kind of melody shaped by stress patterns—still resonates.

Curated and translated by Buğra Giritlioğlu, with the collaboration of Daniel Scher, The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish: Poems from the New Millennium (Syracuse University Press, 2025) seeks to dismantle the “Orient of the anthologies,” as Laurent Mignon calls it in his incisive foreword, offering instead a mosaic of voices that refuses reduction to cliché or cultural shorthand. The volume spans 172 poems by 61 poets, weaving canonical figures alongside bold experimenters who push the boundaries of form and language. Familiar names, such as Lâle Müldür and Murathan Mungan, converse with emerging poets whose works might otherwise remain inaccessible to English-language readers. The effect is an anthology that is not merely representative but dialogic.

Turkish, with its null-subject syntax and layered ambiguities, resists a one-to-one mapping into English. Rather than smoothing these difficulties, the translators lean into them. “If any of the translations seem obscure,” Giritlioğlu writes, “the reader can rest assured the originals are equally so.” This refusal to domesticate feels radical in an era of over-sanitized translations. Scher’s role balances this fidelity with readability, bringing a native ear attuned to English idiom

In this interview, I speak with Buğra Giritlioğlu, whose background straddles materials science, ethnomusicology, and literary translation, and Daniel Scher, whose editorial eye and native English fluency helped shape the anthology’s final voice. We discuss the puzzles and pleasures of translating experimental Turkish poetry, the ethics of collaboration, and the aesthetic fault lines that define this vibrant literary moment. From negotiating null-subject ambiguities to preserving sonic textures across languages, their reflections offer a rare glimpse into the labor behind making a national literature audible in another tongue.

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): Buğra, given your background in materials science and ethnomusicology, how do these fields inform your work as a translator of poetry?

Buğra Giritlioğlu (BG): Both materials science and ethnomusicology have shaped how I think, in ways that carry over into translation. All three require an inquisitive, analytical mindset. Translation often involves a kind of optimization, much like materials science: you’re constantly weighing trade-offs, making fine-tuned adjustments, and aiming for the best possible version under specific constraints.

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Transgressive, Phantasmagorical Banquet: A Review of The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka

August 13, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sayani Sarkar

. . . Luka's rendering moves beyond the Rilkean dream realm into a world of flesh and blood . . .

The Minotaur’s Daughter by Eva Luka, translated from the Slovakian by James Sutherland-Smith, Seagull Books, 2025

The Minotaur’s Daughter, the English-language debut of Slovakian poet Eva Luka, unfurls a tapestry of phantasmagoria, animism, resistance, and transgression. Born in 1965 in the town of Trnava, Eva Lukáčová’s career in verse began with the collection Divosestra (Wildsister), published in 1999, which was followed by Diabloň (Deviltree) in 2005 (upon which she began using the shortened version of her name), Havranjel (Ravenangel) in 2011, and Jazver (I-Beast) in 2019. The Minotaur’s Daughter contains work from the first three publications, compiling them in a immersive, wildly populated series that plunges their readers into a universe of vivid imagery and sensation.

From Divosestra, the title of a particular poem, ‘Diabloň’, became the title of Luka’s second collection; samely, ‘Havranje’ from Diabloň became the title poem of her third collection, from which the poem ‘Jazver’ (I-Beast) became the title of her fourth collection. This interconnectedness between the poet’s body of work reflects her continuity of themes and imagery—an ever-deepening quest to go into more complex levels of introspection. Prominently featuring various creatures and their biological transformations, Luka preserves throughout a distinct focus on water and the moist elements of body and nature. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “My Shadow Will Comfort You” by ariel rosé

August 12, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Frank L. Vigoda

in the fog I heard your / steps retracing the past / we spoke our mother tongues

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a nostalgic and impressionistic poem from Polish-Norwegian poet ariel rosé, translated from the Polish by Frank L. Vigoda. In “My Shadow Will Comfort You,” the speaker reaches across time to address a loved one, now lost to the past. Wandering through the valley of memory, they search for a connection that once defined their world. The ever-present fog impedes their vision, solidifying the elusiveness of what has slipped away. This lost bond transcends the individual, rooted in shared family history, language, and identity—a private world of meaning that bridged two souls. But the speaker remains suspended between past and present, longing to inhabit both at once, looking for a space between remembrance and the irrevocable passage of time.

 

After Beckett

You see, I’m a dream
collector, you’re a water
carrier and the fog is dense
in the valley I hear someone
knocking
knock
knock
no
it is just a memory
I want to be in many nows at once
I heard the unspoken words
I looked for the dear face

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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. . .

9781917093064

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.”

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