Fiction
from Living Up
By Matt NelsonThe world was ending and—remember when invitations came through the mail in little envelopes sealed with a sticker and sometimes even had hand-drawn inscriptions of your name with confetti inside if the kid who scribbled his address in the corner happened to think good times included hot glue guns and fuzzy piping animal shapes.
Transvestite
by David Dumortier, translated from the French under the direction of Emmanuelle Ertel, Director of NYUรข??s M. A. in Literary Translation: French to English.I live in a lower-class neighborhood of Paris, at the end of a small, dark street, one of the last refuges for some dealers. Once there, you have to come inside the building through a pretty large entryway, walk across the courtyard, then take the correct staircase, follow a corridor, make a right, and it’s at that door that hundreds of men have come knocking.
Approach of the Word
by Lorand Gaspar, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws from his book Sol Absolu forthcoming from ContramundumThe language of poetry can’t be enclosed in any category, can’t be summed up in any function or formula. Neither instrument nor ornament, it scans a word carrying the ages and the fleeting space, founding both stone and history, welcoming their dust. It moves about in the energy that makes and breaks empires.
from Miransù
by Monica Sarsini, translated from the Italian by Maryann De JulioA sound is heard in the air, it parts from the slopes of the mountains and it clots in this basin in which the clarity of the sun tenuously disengages the opacity of a veil that covers it and seems generated from the sterile womb of the web that the dry branches make on the faces of the hills.
