Place: Iraq

Announcing Our September Book Club Title: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili

September 29, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

[Jubaili] departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In this fantastic, sobering, and imagistic collection, Diaa Jubaili uses the folktale traditions of Iraq to reflect newly on war, country, and national history. Unlike traditional legends, where magic lives in the world as phenomenon and circumstance, the characters of these stories defy their grave realities with feats of imagination, in bold and moving demonstrations of how the mind can transcend matter. In humanizing the struggles of Iraq across its conflicts, Jubaili addresses the horrors of war with philosophical wit and metaphysical possibility.

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 USD15 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.

No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti, Deep Vellum, 2022

On the surface, fairy tales should theoretically be easy to translate (if there is a world in which translation is easy); they’re usually simplistically narrated, lexically limited, and short. But of course, texts that seem simple on the surface can often turn out to be immensely difficult, and in the case of fairy tales, perplexing questions arise almost immediately, because so much of what they impart depends on a reader’s pre-existing cultural knowledge. Can any of us remember a time when we didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?

The challenges of translation are made even more evident when the fairy tales are intended for adults, as is the case with Diaa Jubaili’s stories in No Windmills in Basra, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti. In this collection of tales—some less than a page long, some ranging over several pages—Jubaili engages slantwise with the history of Iraq and Basra over the past seventy years. Rather than writing a collection of realist fiction, the author departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.

In the opening story of the collection, “Flying,” for example, a security guard named Mubarak thinks often of launching airborne as he guards the chickens at a poultry plant south of Basra.

. . . he flew twice—not on a plane, or by means of a hot air balloon or parachute, and not even on a giant demon’s wings or a magic carpet as happened so often in the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Nor was he an admirer of the medieval scientist-inventor Ibn Firnas, who dreamed of flapping wings and soaring heights, since Mubarak knew that with that sort of thing, he would eventually end up a pile of broken bones on the side of the road.

There is no magic in this story—at least not the kind we associate with fairy tales—but that does not stop Mubarak from experiencing a journey from the everyday to the cosmic. In his first experience with flight, As an infantry soldier whose company is targeted by bombing, he is tossed into the air after a detonation, being sent briefly into a world where a man airborne is not shorthand for a fighter pilot honing in for the kill, but instead a miracle that allows for deferred violence and peace accords. Of course, Mubarak’s flight comes at the expense of his company, all of whom die in the explosion. Fairy tales are fantastic things, but they’re also dangerous things, and miracles usually have exacting prices. In fact, in this story, American munitions are the only means by which Mubarak can again take flight. The djinns and magicians of the Thousand and One Nights have been replaced by the darker realities of modern warfare. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 3, 2022  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Charlie Ng, and MARGENTO

Book fairs, award shows, and passings from Hong Kong, Spain, and Iraq.

This week, our editors from around the globe report on recent literary awards in Hong Kong, examine the links between the literary scenes in Spain and Romania, and reflect on the passing of a revolutionary Iraqi poet. Read on to find out more!

Charlie Ng, editor-at-large, reporting from Hong Kong

The awards ceremony of the 16th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards was conducted online on 22 May. Renowned Hong Kong writer Xi Xi (the pen name of Cheng Yin) was honored with the Life Achievement Award for her tremendous contribution to Hong Kong literature. Moreover, essayist Tung Chiao won the Award for Outstanding Contribution in Arts, and fiction writer Dorothy Tse Hiu-hung was awarded Artist of the Year for the literary arts category. While two works by Tse, Snow and Shadow and The Door, are available in the English language, Tung Chiao’s works have yet to be translated, despite the fact that he is already a highly acclaimed author in Chinese literary circles.

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Translation Tuesday: “Identity” by Rolla Barraq

March 15, 2022  |  in Translations  |  by Jeffrey Clapp and Muntather Alsawad

From the clouds piled up in the eyes of mothers

This Translation Tuesday, Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp team up to translate a poem by the Iraqi poet Rolla Barraq. Within the poem’s lilting anaphora and its prayer-like solemnity, the speaker beholds an Iraq marked by alternating scenes of hope and hardship; a mise en scene that structures, one may surmise, a young person’s selfhood. As “the track of tanks on the grass” continue to resonate with ongoing world events today, let Rolla Barraq’s words remind us of how words can be one way we remember and recite for our time. 

Identity

From the smile of a child begging at the traffic lights on the hottest day of July
From the rough hand of a porter tired of dreaming
From a woman’s forehead burned by the oven of absence
From the blood that flowed until it became water for the rebellious
From the lover whose soothing voice did not soften his farewell
From a roof cracked by an orphan
From the tears of the homeless, measuring the distance with insults
From old friends who meet along the roads by chance alone
From the slums of death, sidewalks, homes and people
From the tales of a city filled with drunkards, salt
           and women confiding in bits of overheard conversation
From the windows of narrow alleys and their faint noises at night
From the track of tanks on the grass
From the image of God scattered among the victims
From a palm tree still bowing in the shade of the watchers
From a journey between the reeds of the marshes and the gaps between
           strangers
From the singing of a loyalist, about the boy who saw nothing
From the sadness of the white mountains, and the rock of their dark heart
From the clouds piled up in the eyes of mothers
From a flame that slept in the belly of the whale—
You all came to me in Iraq, and I fell in love with you. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

October 15, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury and Suhasini Patni

The latest in global literary news from India to Palestine!

This week, our editors on the ground report news of book fairs, award winners, and recognition of presses publishing translated literature. Suhasini Patni highlights recent Indian fiction receiving acclaim, while Carol Khoury introduces us to an award named after Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a prolific Palestinian writer, artist, and translator. Read on to find out more!  

Suhasini Patni, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

The JCB Prize announced its longlist on October 4, 2021. Two out of the three translations have made it into the shortlist (Delhi: A Soliloquy and Anti-Clock). The winner of the Rs 25 lakh prize—with an additional Rs 10 lakh for the translator if it is a translated title—will be revealed on November 13. A longer discussion on the JCB Literary Prize is available here.

Naveen Kishore, founder of Seagull Books, won the 2021 Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature. Seagull Books was founded in 1982 and began with translating works by Indian regional dramatists into English. For his contribution to publishing, Kishore was made a Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France in 2014 and received the Goethe Medal from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2013. Seagull Books has published English translations of fiction and non-fiction by major African, European, Asian, and Latin American writers with over 500 books and authors such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Mahasweta Devi, and Hélène Cixous. Seagull author Mo Yan was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Kishore published “Notes from a Journal I could have kept [But failed to. Keep]” on Words Without Borders Daily.

GQ released their list of best Indian Fiction of 2021. In this list, they feature The Thinnai by Ari Gautier. Translated from the French by Blake Smith, the book gives a glimpse into the working-class quarters of Pondicherry. A Frenchman chases after a mysterious diamond named after Goddess Sita and explores the social history of the former French colony. An excerpt of the book is available to read here.

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A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

October 7, 2021  |  in News  |  by Andriana Hamas, Janet Phillips, and Mary Hillis

A selection of staff reads from Asymptote’s Fortnightly Airmail!

When it comes to browsing the shelves and diving head-first into the wonderfully vast world of translated literature, sometimes you just need a little help from your friends. In this case—let us be your friends. Our editors are sharing their favourite reads to make sure that yours is time well spent.

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Readers already familiar with Nina Berberova’s fiction in collections such as Billancourt Tales, The Tattered Cloak and The Ladies from St. Petersburg will find her first novel—translated by Marian Schwartz—a surprising divergence in style from the lightness of touch and sparse but pungent details in her stories about small casts of characters grappling with challenges in their everyday lives. Written in 1928-29, The Last and the First (Pushkin Press, 2021) is a drama on a broader canvas about Russian émigrés in France struggling to decide whether to return to the Soviet Union or to throw all their energies into establishing a meaningful life in France, specifically whether to join Ilya, the messianic central character, toiling on the land in Provence. It is driven by a complex plot in which the true identities and motives of some characters are initially hidden, and stylistically has more in common with novels of the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky being the writer who springs most to mind for the intense and knotted emotional relationships between the main characters, their striving for some kind of salvation, as well as in the vivid and grimy descriptions of the backstreets of Paris.

—Janet Phillips, Assistant Managing Editor (Issue Production)

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A tale of two lives, that of a poetess living in the USA and of a Yazidi who saves the women of Sinjar, unfolds through a series of phone calls and a single face-to-face visit. In her pensive The Beekeeper of Sinjar (New Directions, 2018), masterfully translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss, the Iraqi-born Dunya Mikhail recalls her conversations with Abdullah, an ordinary man turned local hero, who has chosen to devote his days and nights to rescuing the innocent girls kidnapped by the militant group Daesh. Simultaneously a meditation on absurdity and a truthful account of real-life experiences, the book offers its readers a path to understanding the shifting values of a region long tormented by its past. The unimaginable loss and heartbreak that pour from every page are curiously accompanied by an almost inhuman ability to forgive, while the deceptively simple descriptions of misery bring home the scale of the disaster. Despite the traumatic events, however, the locals have managed to retain their purity and, what is more, to find time for the poetry of existence. As we all should.

—Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large for Bulgaria READ MORE…

Section Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2020

January 27, 2020  |  in News  |  by Caridad Svich, Eva Heisler, Lee Yew Leong, Sam Carter, and Varun Nayar

Our Section Editors pick their favorites from the Winter 2020 issue!

We thought of the Winter 2020 issue as a fantastic salad, surprising and delightful in its compact variety. We’re willing to concede, however, that it is a large salad; the challenges it presents might be more approachable if they’re coming from a buffet. With so many delights and delectables on offer, where does one begin? Perhaps, we humbly suggest, with these selections from our section editors, which include a Federico García Lorca play and an Eduardo Lalo essay.

From Lee Yew Leong, Fiction, Poetry, and Kurdish Feature Editor:

Brought into English by Caitlin O’Neil (a former team member, I’m thrilled to say), Corinne Hoex’s sensuous—and sensational—Gentlemen Callers is full of exquisite treats, rivaling Belgian compatriot Amélie Nothomb’s wit, humor, and imagination. Although Asymptote makes it its mission to move beyond world literature’s Eurocentric focus, it’s gems like this that remind me that there’s still much to discover from smaller, less heard-from countries within Europe. I would consider it scandalous if Hoex’s fiction is still unknown in the world literature canon ten years down the road. From the Poetry section, Gnaomi Siemens accompanies her sexy, updated take of Ephemeris (horoscopes from the 16th century) with a thought-provoking note: “Horoscopes (hora / time, skopos / observation) are ephemeral. Translation is an observation of time and a holding up of the writings and ideas of one time to observe them in a new temporal context.” Pair with Joey Schwartzman’s 21st-century renderings of T’ang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. Whip-smart and bittersweet, these timeless poems about transience will stay with you for at least a little while.

From Sam Carter, Criticism Section Editor:

This issue’s Criticism section introduces us to two poetry collections that embody the Asymptote mission by refusing to be contained by borders, whether linguistic or geographic. Our very own Lou Sarabadzic takes us through the important work done by Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology, which contains poems from ninety-three writers and nineteen languages in order to provide a comprehensive portrait of this terrible atrocity. And Emma Gomis reviews Time, Etel Adnan’s latest exploration of temporality and poetic form that arose from a series of postcards exchanged with the Tunisian artist Khaled Najar. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Mulberries” by Mahmoud Saeed

April 9, 2019  |  in Translations  |  by William M. Hutchins

I offered him my heartfelt thanks while panting because I was so frightened that my spirit had virtually left my body. Privately I praised God.

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, Mahmoud Saeed brings us a tale that transverses multiple nations and seemingly multiple visions of time. With the transitive nature of a fable and the striking imagery of reality, this story turns and dreams and lingers, much like the sweetness of remembered fruit.

I wasn’t merely delighted when I saw a mulberry tree in Chicago, I was so ecstatic that—as we say in Iraq—I felt I was flying. When we say this, we really feel we are aloft, even though none of us ever did fly into the air whether from happiness or sorrow. The point is that I rushed over to it and stood beneath its branches, which were heavily laden with a crop of delectable fruit.  Many mulberries had fallen and created a large, solid circle around it, turning the earth a deep blue-black color. I didn’t even know how long it had been since I tasted a mulberry! Perhaps it had been a quarter century, and that had been in Turkey, where I had eaten white mulberries that gleamed in the sunshine. Each of those mulberries had been almost as long as my thumb, but thicker, and that was the first time I had seen such large mulberries. Their taste was extremely delicious, and each one almost melted between my teeth, filling my mouth with its unique juice. Once this enters the stomach, it is a balm that cures almost all digestive complaints.

In America, there are a few types of mulberry, but none of them rivals the distinctive taste of the mulberry that grows back home in Iraq. The taste here is either sweet-sour or sweet in such a flavorless way that it doesn’t appeal to the taste buds. It may also be sweet but have a bitter aftertaste. In any case, in America I’ve never found a variety of mulberry I like without reservation. When I spotted this particular tree with its black mulberries, I decided to try them and put some in my mouth. READ MORE…

Classic Philosophy Meets Arabic Language: A Dialogue with Professor Peter Adamson

March 21, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Jonathan Egid

A tenth-century resident of Baghdad could read Arabic versions of just about everything by Aristotle that we can read today.

The great Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries changed the Near East and beyond politically, culturally, and, in a particularly profound and lasting way, linguistically, resulting in the near hegemony of the Arabic language. This new Islamic world took shape around an original and powerful new religion, but the consolidation of an Islamic civilisation was also a period of immense cultural exchange and mutual influence, not only from fellow Abrahamic traditions such as Judaism and Christianity, but also from the world of classical Mediterranean antiquity. Indeed, while knowledge of classical Greek science and philosophy fell into virtual oblivion in the Christian West, Islamic scholars kept the tradition alive by means of large scale translation projects and sophisticated philosophical works, from the Persian Avicenna to Baghdad’s legendary house of learning and the Andalusian polymath Averroes. In this interview, Professor Peter Adamson of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München talks us through this fascinating and often overlooked period in philosophical history by exploring the works of translation that made it possible.

Jonathan Egid (JE): By the time the grand translation projects of the early Islamic world began, the wonders of classical Greek philosophy had attained the status of ancient wisdom, almost one thousand years old and already much discussed and much translated. How did the works of Greek thinkers come to be translated into Arabic, and what was the interest in these ancient and foreign ideas?

Peter Adamson (PA): This was a process that unfolded over the course of centuries. The translation movement begins already in the eighth century CE and continues well into the tenth century. It was basically an initiative of the elites under the Abbasid caliphate, including even caliphs themselves and the caliphal family, who also had philosophers as court scholars. For instance, al-Kindī, the first philosopher to make explicit use of Hellenic materials in his own writing, was tutor to a caliph’s son and dedicated his most important work to the caliph himself. The translators were well paid experts, so this was a very deliberate and expensive undertaking managed from the top down. It should, however, be said that it was not something that was undertaken in a vacuum. For quite a long time there had already been translations made from Greek into Syriac and other Semitic languages, and these were a model for the Arabic translations (sometimes literally: it was known for works to be translated first into Syriac for the purpose of making an Arabic version on that basis). Also I would say the translation movement had a kind of momentum of its own: whereas at first the texts to be translated were really selected by the elite and for a variety of practical or political motives, eventually they get to the stage where they are translating the entire output of certain thinkers, or at least everything they can get their hands on, in a kind of completist project. So for instance, one of the greatest translators, Hunayn ibn Ishaq, was clearly trying to translate whatever he could by Galen, the most important Greek medical authority, while his son Ishaq ibn Hunayn worked his way through Aristotle.

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What’s New in Translation: January 2019

January 7, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Clayton McKee, Jacqueline Leung, and Lara Norgaard

You won't be lacking reading material in the new year with these latest translations, reviewed by Asymptote team members.

Looking for new books to read this year? Look no further with this edition of What’s New in Translation, featuring new releases translated from Kurdish, Dutch, and Spanish. Read on to find out more about Abdulla Pashew’s poems written in exile, Tommy Wieringa’s novel about cross-cultural identities, as well as Agustín Martínez cinematic thriller.

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Dictionary of Midnight by Abdulla Pashew, translated from the Kurdish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, Phoneme Media (2018)

Review by Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong

Dictionary of Midnight is a collection of several decades of Abdulla Pashew’s poetry as he recounts the history of Kurdistan and its struggle for independence. Translated from the Kurdish by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse, the work includes a map of contemporary Iraq and a timeline of Kurdish history for those unfamiliar with the plight of the Kurds, something Pashew, one of the most influential Kurdish poets alive today, has taken upon himself to convey and to honor.

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The 2018 Man Booker International Shortlist: the Subjective Nature of Literary Merit

April 26, 2018  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

"Fiction at its finest”, as the Man Booker tagline describes its self-imposed mission.

“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader,” Vladimir Nabokov reminds us in his article “Good Readers and Good Writers”. There are so many books in this world, and unless your life revolves solely around books, it might be hard to be widely read and an active re-reader. Attaining this level of perfection that Nabokov describes is impossible, but the idea of re-reading as a tool to better understanding the value of a book underpins the philosophy of the Man Booker Prize International’s judging panel since its inception.

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The Man Booker International 2018 Longlist: At the Boundaries of Fiction

March 22, 2018  |  in Essays, News  |  by Barbara Halla

"Non-European works included in the longlist come highly recommended by readers and critics alike."

The 2018 Oscars may be over, but the awards season for the literary world has barely begun, with the Man Booker International Prize receiving the most international attention. In the world of translated fiction, the Man Booker International holds a prestige similar to the Oscars, which explains the pomp and excitement surrounding the announcement of this year’s longlist, made public March 12. The longlist includes thirteen books from ten countries in eight languages, from Argentina to Taiwan.

The MBI used to be a career-prize akin to the Nobel, awarded to a non-British author for his or her entire body of work every two years. Since its merger with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize its format has changed. Now the Prize seeks to honor the author and translator of the best book (“in the opinion of the judges”) translated into English and published in the UK for the eligible period. For 2018, all eligible submission were novels or short story collections published between May 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018. Much like its sister prize (known simply as the Man Booker Prize), the winner of the MBI tends to garner much attention and sees a boom in book sales. Its history accounts for its prestige, but just as importantly, the MBI is one of the few prizes out there that splits the monetary value of its prize between the writer and translator.

Part of the MBI’s unofficial mission is to raise the profile of translated fiction and translators in the English-speaking world and provide a fair snapshot of world literature. What does this year’s longlist tell us about the MBI’s ability to achieve that goal? Progress has been made from past years, especially with regard to gender equality: six of the thirteen nominated authors and seven of the fifteen translators are women. Unfortunately, issues arise when taking into account the linguistic and regional diversity of the prize not only this year, but with previous lists as well. For 2018, only four of the thirteen books come from non-European authors, with no titles from North and Central America or Africa. This is an issue that plagued the IFFP before it merged with the MBI and marks even the Nobel Prize for literature, as detailed by Sam Carter in his essay “The Nobel’s Faulty Compass.”

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In Review: Banthology, edited by Sarah Cleave

March 14, 2018  |  in Reviews  |  by Cassie Lawrence

Good stories help us to make sense of the world.

In January 2017, independent British publisher Comma Press announced that in 2018 they would only be publishing authors from ‘banned nations’. This was a response to President Trump’s directive to block entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries for ninety days. Whilst continuing to generate hate and divide people, Trump’s announcement did give rise to some positive news. Organisations around the world stood up to fight for the rights of the citizens of these countries. In a show of solidarity, Asymptote’s Spring 2017 issue featured writing from authors in many of the countries affected. And now, a new title from Comma Press, Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations, has just been published in this spirit.

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2018: A Year of Reading Adventurously

January 5, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Caitlin O'Neil, Chris Power, Claire Jacobson, and Theophilus Kwek

In 2018, I’ll be making an effort to trace my inheritance as an Anglophone, Southeast Asian poet of faith and colour.

After the recently concluded blog series in which we looked back on 2017’s literary discoveries, we bring you our New Year’s reading resolutions.

Chris Power, Assistant Editor:

I work in French and German, so I’ll start with my French literary resolutions: I’m reading Marx et la poupée (Marx and the Doll) by Maryam Madjidi with my friend and former French professor, the psychoanalytic literary theorist Jerry Aline Flieger. Excerpts of the novel of course appear in our current issue. If it isn’t my favorite work we’ve published, then it stands out for being the one that overwhelmed my critical faculties. I couldn’t write about it in the disinterested manner that I prefer. Instead I wrote a confused, gushing blurb listing my favorite scenes and describing how it brought tears to my eyes. An emphatic “yes” was all I could muster. Next on my list is Réparer le monde (Repair the World) by Alexandre Gefen, to which Laurent Demanze dedicated a beautiful essay in Diacritik in late November. I’m looking forward not only to an insightful survey of contemporary French literature, but also to a provocative anti-theoretical turn in the history of literary theory, namely a theory of the utility of literature (to repair the world) which cites pragmatist philosophers like John Dewey. Gefen introduces this theory enticingly through a reading of Barthes in his lecture “A quoi bon ? Les pouvoirs de la littérature (La tentation de l’écriture)” / “What’s the use? The powers of literature (the temptation of writing)” which is available online, but I must admit that I’m reminded of a Baudelaire quote dear to me: “Être un homme utile m’a toujours paru quelque chose de bien hideux.” (“To be a useful man has always appeared to me to be particularly hideous.”) In 2018 I’ll also continue exploring the work of Sarah Kofman, who seems to me to be a diamond in the rough of historical amnesia and a potential dissertation topic. She’s exactly the kind of Nietzschean, Parisian philosopher-poet of the 1960s who worked at the intersection of philosophy and art that we’ve grown so comfortable labelling a “theorist,” but she hasn’t (yet) acquired the cult following of her dissertation advisor Gilles Deleuze or colleague Jacques Derrida.

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Section Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2017

November 2, 2017  |  in News  |  by Aditi Machado, Ah-reum Han, Caridad Svich, Claire Jacobson, Ellen Jones, and Joshua Craze

Our editors choose their favourites from this issue.

Asymptote’s new Fall issue is replete with spectacular writing. See what our section editors have to say about the pieces closest to their hearts: 

As writer-readers, we’ve all been there before. Who of us hasn’t been faced with that writer whose words have made us stay up late into the night; or start the book over as soon as we’re done; or after finally savoring that last word, weep—for all the words already written and that would never to be yours. The feeling is unmistakeable, physical. In her essay, “Animal in Outline,” Mireia Vidal-Conte describes this gut feeling after finishing El porxo de les mirades (The Porch of the Gazes) by Miquel de Palol: “What are we doing? I thought. What are we writing? What have we read, what have we failed to read, before sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper? What does and doesn’t deserve readers?” There are the books that make you never want to stop writing, and the books that never make you want to write another word (in the best way possible, of course). Vidal-Conte reminds writers again that none of us is without context—for better or for worse. Her essay is smart, playful, honest, and a must-read from this issue.

—Ah-reum Han, Writers on Writers Editor

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