Is there such a thing as social momentum in this world? Almost a year ago a good friend of mine from Singapore asked me if I wanted to be a part of his new literary journal that was going to focus on international literature and translation. (Okay, he didn’t ask me so much as tell me that I was, out of the blue, the Special Feature editor.) It’s called Asymptote and the fourth issue of the year is going to come out this month. 

I’m no longer the Special Feature editor (it was too much work—I am working a paid job almost full time and trying to write and always busy falling in love…) but I’m still on staff as a contributing editor which has meant I’ve done a little bit of everything. Recently I chose the excerpt from Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s excellent new novel The Truth About Marie that’s going to run in the October issue. I’ve also been working with a writer on her short feature article about an Albanian novelist named Elvira Dones. 

Anyway, I wrote all that to say that the new issue is shaping up. Lydia Davis sent us some translations from the Dutch (and if you’ve read any of her small pieces about cows, you’ll know why she was drawn to translate them). AND we’ve gotten two write ups this week. (We’re rolling!) The first was a feature in Publishers Weekly, which was sourced from an interview with that good friend of mine from Singapore. It talks about how we’re unique and who we are. The other was a brief review on the Paris Review’s blog, where we’re one of their latest staff picks (fourth paragraph). We’re called a “new and impressively eclectic online magazine,” which sounds exactly like something I’d want to be involved with. 

“Hi, you’ve reached New York. New York can’t answer right now but it’s NOT because New York is sleeping, because New York never sleeps. New York is too busy living life as it should be lived. New York is sitting in a zooming yellow taxi and watching Manhattan glow in the sunrise. New York is floating in the air after having fired off a perfect jumpshot on the basketball court on West 4th Street. New York is hanging around on the pier below Christopher Street with the rock-hard hip-hop gays who skip rope and greet each other with kisses on the cheek. New York is standing on a flat twilight roof in Green Point and looking out over its own blinking skyscraper silhouette and thinking: New York is unbeatable. And as you see New York always speaks of itself in the third person. Leave a message. (Beep.)”

The first paragraph of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s awesome short story Only in New York from Asymptote.

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You may know that I have my hands in an ambitious young journal named ASYMPTOTE, and you may also know that we’ve published so far Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Bernard, Aimé Césaire, Gozo Yoshimasu, Molly Gaudry, and others.

You may not know that while we are intent on publishing literature in translation, we have for the second issue a section devoted to literature written originally in the English language, but with a stipulation. Here’s the details (also at this link):

Special feature:

For the upcoming issue, we invite submissions of English-language original fiction, poetry, and memoir/non-fiction (written in English) that features an “encounter between languages” as its crux or as a significant plot point. Those matters that are, to use a cliché, “lost in translation” (or perhaps even more importantly, those that are “found in translation”): the misread sign, the foreign significant other, the Japanese obstetrician delivering a Swedish baby, etc.

We also continue to invite, as always, essays (written in English, passionately, in less than 1500 words) about a relatively unknown author writing in a language other than English that deserves more attention from the English-speaking world.

Here’s an example from my archives:

Vi’s Favorite Food

by Anthony Luebbert

Vi told me, in her voice that whistled, that her favorite food was fish sauce, except I heard it as fisauss.

“Fisauss? How do you spell that? What is it?”

“It’s my favorite food!” she said.

I was left in the lurch and unable to provide her favorite food for her if she was ever to eat over. I wrote down fisauss in a journal of mine, searched the internet for it, and asked around at Asian and European markets, hoping to find fisauss. The internet had no suggestions as to its identity, and the people in the markets just shrugged their shoulders and said they probably didn’t carry it.

One February day, I was over at Vi’s house for tea, and on her shelf was a bottle of fish sauce.

“Oh!” I said. “Your favorite food is fish sauce!”

“Yes! Fisauss!”

If you have anything similar that you’d like for us to consider, send it to editors@asymptotejournal.com or anthony@asymptotejournal.com