Sofie Verraest Fields fly by. They’re squares. Then they’re triangles, lines, nothing. One after the next fields fly to nothing. A smell of beaten steel. Something unstoppable about this train. The whole way no one comes to check my ticket. Earlier today I’m visiting my grandpa again at the retirement home. It’s […]
Theodora Bauer —Translated by the author 1922 5. Ana remembers how it felt to see the statue looking down on them so sternly, behind it the country, the land that came closer by the minute. They landed on the shore of New York, the skyscrapers so close that it seemed […]
Pablo Baler Translated by Michael McGaha The Crane Aramiru Kamyshiura was the Grand Champion of Sumo Wrestling, but in his spare time, he made little paper birds. Before settling his two hundred seventy kilos on the mat, he bowed to the goddess Amateratzu. He chose a sheet of black designs and […]
Nathan Go In the night, we wake to find another of our kind, dead. Gamma was at the ravine, chasing after a cattle herd, when Death-Wind blew a hole in him. He could not move, he could not breathe. Nobody to the rescue. It’s called a gun, Alpha says. That’s why we […]
Jo Langdon ONE Sage is a witch. She tells him, the red berries will make you dead; the orange ones can revive you. Jimmy doesn’t want to eat them, red or orange or at all. The tree Sage has picked them from has coarse, greenish-black bark, which makes it look poisonous, […]
Chiara Valerio There’s a certainty you are grasping now And it’s not the Angel It’s not a miracle It’s not the hand of the Lord It’s you —“Cuore di tenebra,” BAUSTELLE I have nothing in hand. If I was an illusionist they would be five surprising words, more, they would be a curtain, all […]
Chiara Valerio (an excerpt from the novel, Human History of Mathematics) There is no straight line without depth, and there are no perfect circumferences. The imagination that Euclid requires—since the third century before Christ to today—of whoever reads his Elements is bigger than the one necessary to follow the stories of gods […]
Read More… from Everything that Euclid Speaks of, Does Not Exists
Taymour Soomro I start forgetting things. Sometimes I remember that I’m forgetting but sometimes I don’t so I keep a list. I note the consequences because I think that may provide an incentive for me to remember in the future. Forgot: to wear sash. Consequence: beaten on soles of feet and pay docked for […]
Sacha Idell Kariya’s phone stops working somewhere in the air above Hokkaido. He isn’t sure what happened; at the beginning of the flight, he switched it—dutifully—to airplane mode when the captain reminded the passengers to do so, but as soon as he lands in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, his phone has stopped working entirely. He presses the power button, the home […]
A Chance to Unite: New Voices in International Writing ISOLE, © Julie Polidoro 2019 In June of 2018 I participated in the Kostova Foundation’s Sozopol Literary Seminars in Bulgaria, giving a lecture and a reading. I also assisted Elizabeth Kostova in choosing the five fiction fellows who would attend her writing workshop at the […]
