Place: France

November 2025: Upcoming Opportunities in Translation

November 22, 2025  |  in News  |  by Kathryn Raver

An open house with Queens College, and more of this month's opportunities in world literature!

EDUCATION

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QUEENS COLLEGE MFA IN CREATIVE WRITING &  LITERARY TRANSLATION

The MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College—located in the most culturally and linguistically diverse in the nation—will hold a virtual Open House information session, December 4, 5-6pm EST. The program is dedicated to crossing boundaries in genre, craft, and language. Our literary translation track offers students an opportunity to work intensively on craft and pursue professional opportunities in the field. Classes are small, and students work closely with faculty mentors. Translation students also take cross-genre courses in our other tracks in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Apply by March 15 for financial aid consideration; final deadline April 15. For a zoom link and more information, see their website.

 

EVENTS

BCLT RESEARCH SEMINAR: TRANSLATION AND MULTILINGUALISM IN INDIAN FRANCOPHONE WRITING

This coming Wednesday, November 26th, join author, translator, and past Asymptote contributor Sheela Mahadevan for a virtual exploration of the works of Indian writers in French. The talk will explore the “entanglements between French and Indian languages, literatures and cultures” that have arisen as a result of processes of translation and “transcreation” in the work of Indian writers writing in the French language. The impact of French literature on some literary traditions in India—a phenomenon arising from Indian writers undertaking acts of French translation during the post-independence period—as well as the role of multilingual translations in shaping certain political and cultural agendas, will also be discussed. The event will take place online from 4-5:30pm GMT. Register here. 

READ MORE…

Beachcombing on The Shores of Belonging: A Review of a grammar of the world by Jeanne Benameur

November 19, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sayani Sarkar

Benameur . . . writes hoping for a third space where languages might meet and reconfigure one another.

a grammar of the world by Jeanne Benameur, translated from the French by Bill Johnston, Les Fugitives, 2025

The oeuvre of the Algerian-French writer Jeanne Benameur ranges from poetry (Naissance de l’oubli) to an award-winning novella (Les Demeurées) to various works of nonfiction, and in her latest work to be released in English, a grammar of the world, readers are introduced to her voice in verse. The collection details the author’s journey from Algeria—just before the declaration of Algerian War of Independence—to La Rochelle in France where she grew up, a transition explored with the complexity of migration and belonging, and suffused with potent mytho-historical narratives. Through her personal experiences of departure and a complex familial history (with both Italian and Tunisian-Algerian roots), Benameur explores the slow persistence of syntax both in life and in language, which—however displaced and fragmented—can still be reassembled into something habitable and meaningful. The lines of a grammar of the world unfold without punctuation, their sparse cadence travelling over the subsequent pages in soft tidal motions, culminating in a single long poem in free verse, with occasional phrasal recurrences to generate a momentum between its various contexts. Throughout, the voice shifts between ancient and contemporary, depending on whether it is situated in historical precedence or mythical imagery; the speaker gently walks between memory and myth.

We begin with an invocation of Isis, the Egyptian goddess who resurrects her slain brother and husband Osiris, and subsequently produces their son, Horus. According to one of the Egyptian myths, Isis helps the dead enter the afterlife, as she had once helped Osiris by collecting his scattered body parts from across Egypt—and this myth later gave rise to the earliest practice of mummification. In a grammar of the world, it is this act of harvesting and laying to rest that Benameur focuses on, envisioning Isis as the weary sister who bends to rescue what remains in the aftermath of war and displacement. ‘she gathers up what no longer belongs’, writes Benameur: “pieces // she braves that which is scattered’. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2025

November 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, Liliana Torpey, and Nichole Gleisner

New work from India, Serbia, France, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Iran, Spain, Lithuania, Palestine, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This month, we’re bringing reviews of eleven different titles from eleven different regions, from a trilingual text of experimental fiction that veers between Vietnamese and English, a visceral and psychically frenetic portrait of a marriage gone wrong, a rich collection from a master Iranian poet that gestures towards his remarkable life, and the latest metafiction from a Spanish literary giant. 

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Dog Star by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Subha Prasad Sanyal, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Something’s rotten in the city of Kolkata. A corrupt managerial class—within which mad scientists and war-mongers play a major role—has conspired with local authorities to capture, confine, and starve as many canines as possible. While the city’s “dead serf-servants and healthful, cellphone-carrying ever-connected mummies and balloons” stagger through their dystopia, the dogs have disappeared from the urban bustle, and no one cares. Animal rights groups have been eliminated, and in the way of Nazi death camps, the system targets even newborn pups. What’s a dog to do in these last dog days? “Bark! Bark!” replies the snappy refrain of Dog Star, the lyrical, subversive, and highly re-readable novella by Bengali writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya, delivered in a kinetic English by Subha Prasad Sanyal, who has doubtlessly advanced this innovative author’s reputation in world literature.

A self-proclaimed fable, Dog Star leads the reader through dark alleys where street dogs—“nerikuttas”—hide from “pincers,” form alliances, trade information about current dangers, and strategize escape plans, looking to the constellation “Lubdhok, aka Dogstar, aka Sirius aka Alpha Canis Majoris” for liberation. These survivors, along with their unlikely feline allies, are anthropomorphized in their emotions and dialogues, and their plight, although set in West Bengal, is familiar enough to seem representative of any place under political (dis)order. The Netanyahu regime’s genocide against Gaza comes to mind, for example, as do the active “detention centers” in the US: “They’ll yank and drag you by your neck with the pincers to the caged car. Then throw you in.” Bhattacharya does not avoid visceral descriptions of animal torture, but he balances its brutality with astute irony, giving the murderers absurd lines like: “We must pay heed that there aren’t ridiculous expenses.” READ MORE…

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.

In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.

Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.

Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.

Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

October 17, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Kathryn Raver

The latest literary news from France, Palestine, and Kenya!

This week, our editors report on a busy literary season, filling us in on awards to watch for, considering the politics of prizes, and reporting on exciting literary festivals. Read on to find out more!

Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France

The French literary awards season is upon us! Over the course of the last few weeks, the juries of prizes such as the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis have announced their shortlists and/or laureates. Though the Goncourt is arguably the most well-known and prestigious of France’s literary awards, there are countless others awarded each year, from those awarded by the Académie Française to those given by individual bookshops, each of them celebrating Francophone and world literature in their own way.

Les Deux Magots, a well-renowned Parisian literary café with 140 years of history behind it, awarded its 92nd yearly prize last week to Swiss author Joseph Incardona for his recent novel Le monde est fatigué. The novel follows a young woman who acts as a mermaid at aquariums, but whose fake tail hides a body damaged by a grievous accident for which she is determined to seek revenge. Le monde est fatigué has also been longlisted for the Prix Femina, alongside works by other celebrated Francophone authors such as Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Au grand jamais and Nathacha Appanah’s La nuit au cœur. The prize’s shortlist is set to be announced on October 21st, with the winner announced November 3rd.

The prize that I, personally, am watching most closely is the Prix Décembre, which defines itself as a sort of “anti-Goncourt”. The longlist includes works such as Laura Vazquez’s Les Forces (whose poetry appeared in Asymptote’s October 2022 edition) and the newest novel of Wendy Delorme (whose work was recently translated and featured in one of Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday columns). Last year, the Prix Décembre went to Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa, a past laureate of PEN America’s Literary Translation Award who has also appeared in several of Asymptote’s past issues. The laureate is set to be announced on October 28th.

Shatha Abd El Latif, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Palestine READ MORE…

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 2001 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 mustached 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…

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…

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…

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…