Posts featuring Phoebe Giannisi

A Thousand Lives: Staff Reads from Around the World

Our staff's recommendations from Greece and India!

This month, our editors select their recent favorite works, including Greek poetry that muses on the voices of cicadas and the natural world, as well as an Indian novel of friendship, philosophy, and the changing Delhi cityscape. Read on to find out more! 

Phoebe Giannisi already had me with her Homerica (2017), and now has got me again with her new book Cicada (New Directions, 2022). Beautifully translated, like Homerica, by Brian Sneeden, the book resounds with an “alien voice from the fence of the teeth.” Alien, not only because it is the song of the cicadas that is constantly evoked and lurks from underneath the pages since its clear-voiced announcement in the title, but even more so because the voice here belongs to all sorts of beings, especially the non-human ones. It’s the wind, and the earth, the figs, and the fish, and the egg, the sea, the rain. Words, “the thing that is most yours,” are borrowed from elsewhere. For how else could there be a meditation on the passing of time and transformations, unless out of attention to that which is always present yet is almost impossible to record: the sound or, to say it with Virginia Woolf, “the murmur or current behind it,” the humming of it?

–Cristina Pérez Díaz, Editor-at-Large for Puerto Rico

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

We're back with weekly updates in world literature from around the globe!

We’re back with our regular Friday column featuring weekly dispatches from our Asymptote team, telling you more about events in world literature. Join us on a journey to Guatemala and Chile, before heading to New York City, to find out more about the latest in world literature.

José García Escobar, Editor-At-Large, reporting from Guatemala:

We begin with great news coming from the Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon whose novel Mourning (Duelo in Spanish) got shortlisted for the 2018 Kirkus Prize. Halfon, whom we interviewed for our blog last June, is sitting beside other fantastic writers such as Ling Ma, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, and Lauren Groff. Mourning, published by Bellevue Literary Press, was translated into English by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. The winner will be announced on Thursday, October 25, 2018.

Additionally, Halfon was just declared the recipient of the 2018 Miguel Angel Asturias National Prize in Literature, the most important literary prize in Guatemala.

On a much sadder note, recently, one of Guatemala’s most influential and emblematic poets, Julio Fausto Aguilera has passed away at the age of 88. He won the Miguel Angel Asturias prize, in 2002; he was part of the arts collective Saker-Ti, and one of the founding members of Nuevo Signo—arguably one of the most important literary groups in Central America. He wrote close to twenty books of poetry, and his family confirmed that he left two manuscripts that they hope will get published soon. Francisco Morales Santos, his friend en Nuevo Signo’s editor, called Julio Fausto a worthy and unbreakable man. Many other writers such as Vania Vargas and the most recent winner of the Miguel Angel Asturias Prize, Francisco Alejandro Méndez, also mourned the death of Aguilera.

To read more about Aguilera and Nuevo Signo, click here.

READ MORE…