RaveAsymptote JournalBloom and Other Poems is a finely curated and translated collection of poems, powerfully exhibiting a poet’s philosophical and poetic stamina...In mining the depths of a single word, conceit, or even of history itself to simultaneous completion and depletion, Xi Chuan rewards those who come out on the other side of each poem with new orientations and disorientations—confluences that perhaps this era has not even begun to understand it needs.
Ta-wei Chi tr. Ari Larissa Heinrich
RaveAsymptoteChi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist, tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan ... What stands out in Chi’s approach to science fiction is that he does not only emphasise the way science shapes the individual, but also how fiction as a technology can reimagine the extensions and contours of the self.
Federico Falco
RaveAsymptoteIn five impeccably crafted short stories, Argentine writer Federico Falco displays his distinctive gift for distilling and dramatising the quietude of rurality to generate—from such ostensibly minor landscapes—an intense and varied portrait of life on the geographical periphery ... Falco’s fiction cohesively articulates—as the book’s intellectual and emotional pleasure—retreat as a way of life against the hedonism of pursuit ... One of the most affecting powers of Falco’s prose is his uncanny ability to world an ecological landscape ... We endear to Falco’s characters not because they offer themselves up to us transparently, like so many verbose and erudite narrators and protagonists of contemporary fiction ... One walks away from these stories with the rare feeling that their allure emanates from their intense guarding of one’s interiority; we root for their restraint and reservation—their allegiance to place, not people—and are rewarded when, in carefully timed moments, they put aside their enigma, allowing us a glimpse at the tenderness that had hitherto remained private ... Here is writing which transforms provincialism into the province of fiction, drama, and ultimately, nourishment, stories which have perfected the art of refusal.
Paolo Maurensig
RaveAsymptote JournalWith brisk footwork and dazzling prose rendered into English by Anne Milano Appel, the novel brims with the voice of Sultan Khan’s urgency to relate—at the end of one’s life, on the brink of a war—his prolific if foreshortened rise to fame in the throes of a fading yet persistent imperialism ... With this bold and compelling act of historical imagination, Maurensig imbues another great but marginalised figure of chess history with a capacious interiority and a history as intricate and elegant as the most calculated chess games; a minor history played against and with the grand History of imperialism, fascism, and migration. Beyond the veneer of Sultan Khan’s sparkling championship trophies, there lies a deep ambivalence about his own identity ... by his very own calculation, Maurensig’s Sultan Khan embodies the tension of at once making history and being made by history, of writing and being written.
