Posts filed under 'transition'

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…

My 2018: Chloe Lim

December 21, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Chloe Lim

There are only so many homes we can be familiar with, but allowing others to introduce their homes to us makes the world seem so much bigger.

In today’s post, Assistant Blog Editor Chloe Lim shares the books that defined her year in reading. As she moved between two cities and two phases of her life, Chloe also explored literature from Albania, Taiwan, and the Caribbean diaspora—and made some reading resolutions for 2019 along the way!

2018 has been a strange transitional year. I spent half of it in Oxford, finishing a Masters degree, and the other half in Singapore. Making sense of the world, and the daily madness of news cycles, became just a bit more bewildering working from two different cities. Recently, my days have been filled by attempts to try new things, and being open to the unexpected experiences that moving can bring. My year in reading has followed that pattern: eclectic as a whole, but generous in providing new perspectives and often respite from the chaos of world politics.

A friend gave me a copy of Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun for my birthday last year, and it became one of the first books I read this year. A slim novel in and of itself, it’s breathtaking in its pacing, and filled with Murakami’s trademark haunting prose. Arguably a great read for the winter months, Shimamoto’s melancholy, grief, and terrible loneliness are coupled with an ennui she compares to the illness hysteria siberiana. Picturing herself as a Siberian farmer, she explains:

“Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You throw your plough aside and, your head completely empty of thought, you begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun.”

READ MORE…