from It Must Be a Misunderstanding
Mexican poet, teacher and translator Coral Bracho was born in Mexico City in 1951. She has published several books, two in English thanks to poet-translator Forrest Gander, who has put this composite volume together, the first extensive compilation of Bracho’s work to be published in the UK. A wide selection from Bracho’s earlier collections is...
Frontists, Stalinist and murderers
Frentista, estalinista, asesina loca. Una palabra detrás de otra, un conjunto de palabras elaboradas en una ecuación implacable. Sílabas sonoras, perfectas, que iban organizando una cadena armónica que resonaba igual que una recurrente letanía. So begins the next chapter, and I know it’s going to cause me trouble. The first sentence is just four words:...
Raving
He kissed my cracked lips. ‘A paternal kiss… you are like a daughter to me.’ I run my tongue over my lips. Oozing, something sticky. Blood… saliva? Who knows. Someone is shining a bright light into my eyes… I’m trying to open them… I can’t. My head is weighed down… I try again… I close...
Knowing who the real monsters are
A crucial juncture in world history was the encounter between the Helleno-Judeo-Christian tradition on the one hand, and the new tenets of Islam on the other. It manifested itself with particularly momentous poignancy on the intellectual plane through a single concept, upon which depended almost everything that mattered: the right to existence itself, cultural, national,...
Truth or dare
My name is Fatima Daas. I write stories so I don’t have to live my own. I’m twelve years old when I go on a school trip to Budapest. Everyone gathers in the evening to go over the itinerary. Right after dinner, in a big room where there’s no network. Impossible to connect to MSN...
Grandmother and get me out of here
She wakes up. Where is she? The sheets feel damp. Wallpaper. Probably a bedroom. Her feet feel hot. Slippers on. She pushes them off. Carpet. Ugly, ugly carpet, she has the same one at home but it’s much nicer. Bookshelf. Brown and white, gilded spines. Books. Tito’s biography. Then Meša Selimović, Abdulah Sidran, Saša Stanišić,...
Saša Stanišić: Alternative visions
Saša Stanišić was born in former Yugoslavia in 1978 to a Bosnian Muslim mother and Serbian Orthodox father. Their flight into Germany at the outbreak of the Bosnian War in 1992 was fictionalised in his debut novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2006; Grove Atlantic/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008; Pushkin Press, 2015, translated...
Atoms like snowflakes
We are in a city where all the streets go up and down, urbanism on an inclined plane, the goddamned omnipresent sea or mountains, sea to the south, mountains to the north, and a scar in the form of an avenue that bisects the city on the diagonal – skewed along a physical, moral, class...
A thousand and one tales of a philosophical life
What can Hannah Arendt possibly teach us today? What was, and still is one hopes, her indelible imprint on the world, on our humanity, on what she so unwaveringly upheld as civilisation? And who was she? How did she become that singular multitude of perspectives, human facets, existential and conceptual spaces that can certainly lay...
The story of their history
The experience of lost places of belonging, of lost states of existence, together with the tenacity to defy and resist both loss and non-being, are deeply ingrained in the Russian language: thanks to Maxim Gorky, a term such as Бывшие люди, or ‘former people’, would come to acquire an eerily tangible corporeality, reality, and even...
Samira Sedira: The makings of a murder
French-Algerian author and actress Samira Sedira’s People Like Them, her first novel to be translated into English, is a fictional retelling of a real-life multiple murder in a mountain village in Haute-Savoie, in which a recently arrived wealthy black property developer, his white wife and their three young children were brutally killed by a neighbour....
Lagoon
I can’t stop taking pictures of the big ships; I’m doing it this afternoon with Teresa, just as I did that day at the end of July in 2013. I was sitting in the usual bar, on the Riva dei Sette Martiri, where you barely even notice the passage of the cruise ships anymore. They...
