Posts featuring Lee Chang-Dong

Parasite Takes Best Picture!

In a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.

Chances are that you’ve already heard of Bong Joon Ho’s history-making feat at the Oscars yesterday following our prediction in December, but did you know that it wasn’t so long ago that Bong was on a blacklist, along with some 10,000 filmmakers deemed to be critical of the South Korean administration, and those people were prevented from receiving arts funding? As the New York Times notes, Parasite is the first movie not in English in the Academy Award’s 92 years to take the top award; “in a post-‘Parasite’ world, the best-picture winner can come from anywhere.

As we invite you to explore more of what South Korea offers to the world in our extensive archives (ranging from magical realist writing, experimental poetry, and the most inventive science fiction to surreal drama and playful Hangul text art—and including work by Burning director Lee Chang-dong), we hope you’ll also consider joining our mission to break down similar barriers in literature. By coincidence, we too do not receive arts funding, because the government of the country where we are incorporated does not consider our endeavor supportable. Take it from Eliot Weinberger, who has said, “Asymptote may be a small chisel and drill, but these things force cracks that, time and time again, have eventually brought the walls down.

Help us bring the walls down—become a sustaining or masthead member today.

Has it been a joy to watch us grow?

Together, we can do so much more for global literature—and even pay our contributors one day!

It’s been our joy to serve you too. We love playing Fetch! in the name of world literature and can’t wait to see what 2019 brings.

This #GivingTuesday, throw us a bone!

Consider the following. This year alone:

  • We’ve brought you new work from beloved writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Dubravka Ugrešić, Ismail Kadare, Anita Raja, Lee Chang-dong, Robert Walser, Michèle Métail, and Jon Fosse.
  • We’ve added five new languages (Amharic, Igbo, Mè’phàà, Montenegrin, and Q’anjob’al) to our archive, thereby crossing the 100-mark for total number of featured languages.
  • Our Book Club, which will soon enter its second year, signed up 200 subscribers over the course of its first year; these monthly bulk orders have helped independent publishers directly.
  • We continued to advocate for a more inclusive world literature via quarterly educational guides, monthly podcasts, fortnightly airmails, and this very blog, published to a daily schedule. Of our blog columns, we are especially proud of the weekly Around the World with Asymptote dispatches contributed by our editors on the ground in six continents, an offering unique to Asymptote that truly expands the literary conversation.

READ MORE…

Spring 2018: The Dogged Chase of the Actual After the Ideal

Confronting the most immediate limits on human experience while resisting the arbitrary, narrow scope imposed by the commercial book market.

On 19 February 2018, responding to a pitch from Alessandro Raveggi—editor of Italy’s first bilingual literary magazine, The Florentine Literary Review—I arranged for Newsletter Editor Maxx Hillery to run in our Fortnightly Airmail the first of Raveggi’s two-part conversation with John Freeman on the occasion of Freeman’s Italian debut. “I do not feel American literary journals are doing a very good job of curating the best of our present moment,” the former editor of Granta says. “I think an American or American-based literary journal faces two ethical challenges right now, both of them related to aesthetics: 1) to try to redefine the cultural world as not being American-centric, and 2) to reveal America for what it is and has always been, but is just more apparently so now. Attacking these challenges means catching up with the best writers from around the world.” This brings me back thirteen years to the moment I stood up and posed a question to a panel of New York editors: “I am a Singaporean writing about Singapore; would my work be of interest to American publishers?” The immediate response: “Have your characters come to the US.” I end up submitting a story about Chinese diaspora in New York to a literary journal; the rejection letter that comes back reads: “Too much very culturally-specific backstory. . . that western readers would find compelling.” I remember a third encounter, this time with a literary agent who has read my work before our one-on-one meeting; she articulates very memorably why my fiction won’t be a hit: “A writer expresses his intelligence through plot.” But I like T. S. Eliot’s quote better: “Plot is the bone you throw the dog while you go in and rob the house.” Sometimes, in founding Asymptote, I wonder whether I was in fact revolting against all these things that all these well-meaning people have tried to tell me. But if the magazine isn’t a hit, at least I’ll have one fan in John Freeman: he very coincidentally writes me just as I’m composing this preface to say “how important what it is you do there has been for me and for a lot of us who itch to read away from the mundane.” Here to introduce our Spring 2018 issue, and the Korean Fiction Feature I edited, is Interviews Editor Henry Ace Knight.

The Spring 2018 issue is one of Asymptote’s most asymptotic. Its pages are bound together by the familiar themes of futility and compromise and populated by people running up against the invisible but all too real limits imposed on them by the mysterious contours of the self, the precarious obligations of kinship, and the arbitrary structures of power undergirding society. Orphans, émigrés, postwar castaways, and second-generation immigrants all struggle to make sense of asymptotes of personal relationship (how close can we get to one another?), teleology (to fulfilling our desires?), epistemology (to knowing ourselves?), language (to legibility?), and narrative (to completion?). The issue, if it is about anything, is about how people situate themselves in the lacunae that shrink and expand as one approaches only for the other to recede. READ MORE…