Nothing is as simple as it seems at first glance. No object can be seen from only one angle; no idea can be reached solely through the words of one language—lessons translation teaches better than perhaps any other form of writing. Welcome, then, to Notes from the Other Side, our milestone sixtieth edition—sixty!—bringing you never-before-published work from thirty-two countries. In the face of renascent authoritarianism and the AI-driven “enshittification” of the internet, we offer this issue as a rejoinder: a call to critical thinking, deep attention, and a love of literature capacious enough to accommodate the complexity of our shared life. Among its many highlights are Werner Kofler’s darkly humorous homage to Thomas Bernhard; devastating memoirs from Lieke Marsman and Hyun Ki-young; visual poetry by writer-artist Toby Altman; an interview with the inimitable Lisa Robertson; and a Special Feature devoted to “The Reverse Side.” Bringing these many-sided worlds vividly to life is China-born guest artist Alice Yu Deng, whose richly atmospheric paintings transform ordinary objects and landscapes into portals to the uncanny.

What is the reverse side? Sometimes, it is simply what has been covered over—not gone, but continuing to haunt us from below. In Lisa Robertson’s new novel Riverwork, discussed in this issue’s interview, the other side acquires an archaeological dimension through the Bièvre: the Parisian river paved over more than a century ago but still flowing underground. Its burial parallels the forgetting of the working-class laundresses who set up shop along its banks; dig through enough sediment, Robertson suggests, and an entire social history resurfaces. In an essay likewise haunted by what cannot be seen (in this case, a war never directly mentioned), Ukrainian author Anastasia Korbet narrows her focus to a single problem in linguistics: the collapse of two Ukrainian words into the single English word silence—“two silences [that] stand side by side through a wall.” Translation usually promises access to the foreign; here, encountering another language instead illuminates the normally invisible contours of one’s own. “The foreign language does not make mine poorer,” Korbet writes. “It makes it visible.”

For Mishma Nixon, the reverse side is itself twofold: the predicament of a speaker of an endangered language, seen first from without and then from within; and the precarity of a mismanaged fan shop, its tensions left concealed for too long. Joshua Bellin’s “Cognitio” finds reversals in the predicament of a young boy seeking to free the captive songbirds of his village priest, his perspective contrasting with those of the priest, his crush, a mythic ancestor, and, finally, his older self. No less detailed, though considerably narrower in focus, is the scathing monologue of Werner Kofler’s narrator in “After Bernhard,” as he prepares to defenestrate the hapless Italian mistranslator of his finest work. (A Hotel Moonlight may, at any moment, become a Hotel Murderlight; translators, be warned.)

Writing against the currents of the publishing industry, meanwhile, Gabriele Micozzi champions biodiversità letteraria: an organic, untamed mode of writing that refuses the neat classifications preferred by publishers and algorithms. “The page that tries to hold verse and data and theatre and prayer fails, beautifully, in every direction,” he writes; “that failure is the meaning.” This ethos finds vivid expression in Toby Altman’s visual poetry, which rejects a single prescribed reading order in favor of teeming architectures of text, created through his experiments with typesetting software. Iván Soto Camba’s “Rabbits in the Margins” likewise redirects our attention from the official text toward the blank edges of the page—that repository for doodles, daydreams, and whatever escapes institutional order. Connecting the fierce rabbits of medieval manuscripts to those drawn by a bored office worker on her endless forms, Soto Camba shows how the border that should define a text can ultimately betray it.

The nonfiction of the late, great Lieke Marsman is also defined by betrayal—but of the body rather than the page. For Marsman, who died just last month, a cancer diagnosis collapses the future, returning her not to our shared present but to an alternative side of it: a mirror world in which, as she writes, “I can no longer relate to the people of Earth.” Korean writer Hyun Ki-young looks instead toward the long afterlife of collective trauma, reaching into memories of the Jeju 4.3 Massacre that may seem to recede but leave indelible stains. Fateme Delia Montazeri’s “Empty Boxes,” about an Iranian woman raising her children in America, undergoes a curious reversal of its own in translation: as Rodmehr Seddigh notes, the American speech that appeared foreign and unnatural in the Persian original becomes unmarked in English, while Persian now stands out. What some readers accept as the norm was always intended as the cultural exception—one more reminder that where we stand, and the body or language we inhabit, determines what we see.

Questions of position—who gets to look, who is looked at, and who controls the resulting story—also animate Véronique Pittolo’s Helen a user’s guide, translated by Laura Mullen. Its timing could hardly be better: Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is currently taking cinemas—and the box office—by storm, having opened to more than USD264 million worldwide. But where the film follows Odysseus on his heroic journey home, Pittolo turns the myth around to examine Helen, interrogating both “the most beautiful woman in the world” and the stiff gender conventions that have kept her in position for millennia. Deconstructing myth and marriage by turns, Pittolo asks what happened between Helen and Menelaus after Troy, who gets to decide whether she leaves or stays, and why a woman who leaves without explanation is always treated as suspect. “The ghost is an invention meant to save women from the anger of their husbands,” she writes; better yet is the real Helen, wherever she may be: “Whatever the perspective, I like that Helen is out there, that she’s breathing.”

If Pittolo turns myth around to reveal how femininity has been constructed, disciplined, and displayed, Hugo Tepest poses the corresponding question from the other side: what might masculinity mean when disentangled from violence and oppression? Tongue firmly in cheek, “Are Penises Real?” moves seamlessly from a transition-induced comedy of manners to an inquiry into the cultural meanings attached to the body. For dramatist Sacha Guitry, the many sides of masculinity emerge in the neurotic monologue of a lover incapable of tolerating his beloved’s absence; her equanimity and ease only throw his insecurity into sharper relief. His frantic invention of scenarios to fill the space where the woman should be recalls the blind man in Evgeni Silman’s A Harvest of Braille, wandering through a vacuum of language until he can grasp a surface and extract meaning from it.

From these private dramas of gender, possession, and absence, our Outsiders section widens the frame to examine their political counterparts: authoritarianism, war, and the borders that determine who belongs. The allusive verses of Jorge Teillier’s “Adiós al Führer” lead the reader toward an awareness of quotation, variation, and historical recurrence while refusing complacency in the face of authoritarianism with blistering images of fascist cruelty. Zabel Yesayan, writing from Constantinople during the First Balkan War, records the gradual unfolding of catastrophe: the flow of blood, still out of sight but never out of mind, steadily encroaching upon a domestic life that remains, for the moment, peaceful. Andriy Lyubka examines borders both literal and internalized, arguing that multiculturalism does not arise merely from proximity: “Culture is interest, curiosity, effort; multiculturalism is even more effort and the knowledge that effort brings.” As his essay reminds us, the other side can remain foreign even when it is geographically close; to cross over requires attention.

Issue No. 60 represents more than fifteen years of such crossings—and, if I may say so myself, arriving here is no small feat. Since our January 2011 debut, Asymptote has built one of the world’s most substantial free archives of international literature, working across languages, borders, time zones, and an ever-changing virtual masthead. Every issue is a labor of love: the visible publication is only one side of months of commissioning, reading, editing, translating, copyediting, designing, coding, recording, fact-checking, and promoting undertaken by people scattered around the globe. The reverse side is that we have sustained all of this without any ongoing institutional support—which means that the labor required to keep the magazine rigorous, inclusive, free to read, and genuinely international has always been considerably harder than it might appear from the finished issue.

We made some of that hidden history visible in our monthlong #30issues30days showcase, retracing the magazine’s first thirty issues while shedding light on how they were assembled. Thirty issues later, the conditions underlying the work remain precarious. Milestones are occasions for celebration, yes, but also for taking stock: a sixtieth issue does not guarantee a sixty-first, let alone the next sixty. If Asymptote has expanded your sense of what world literature can encompass; if you have discovered a writer, translator, language, or country through our pages; or if you simply believe that an independent international literary space like ours should continue to exist, the most consequential way to mark this milestone is to become a sustaining or masthead member today. Sustaining membership begins at just USD5 a month, but its impact accumulates: regular support allows us to plan beyond the next issue instead of repeatedly confronting the same financial precipice.

If you are unable to contribute financially, there are still many ways to help us carry the work forward: share this milestone edition and follow us on Facebook, X, Threads, our two Instagram feeds, and our daily blog; subscribe to our newsletters; take your reading further by joining the Asymptote Book Club, the only one partnering with independent publishers on both sides of the Atlantic; and consult our submission guidelines to send us your best work. Above all, read widely across this issue and tell others what you find. The other side of every published page is a reader willing to turn it; after sixty issues, we hope we have earned not only your attention, but your support.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Team for Issue July 2026

Editor-in-Chief: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)

Assistant Managing Editors: Sam Bowden (USA), Ella Dailey (Belgium/USA), Veronica Gisondi (Italy), Sofija Popovska (North Macedonia), Kathryn Raver (France/USA), and Sarah Roth (USA)

Section Editors:
Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)
Heather Green (USA)
M.L. Martin (USA)
Willem Marx (Italy/UK)

Senior Assistant Editors: Sophie Eliza Benbelaid (UK) and Chiara Gilberti (Germany/Italy)

Assistant Editors: Bernard Capinpin (Philippines), Sabrina Fountain (USA), Danielle Janess (USA), David Pavlas (Slovenia), Olivia Wolgemuth (USA), Catherine Xin Xin Yu (Canada/Italy), Chris Yeung (Hong Kong/USA), Junyi Zhou (USA), and Lin Chia-Wei (Taiwan) 

Assistant Interview Editor: Sarah Gear

Contributing Editors: Ellen Elias-Bursac (USA), Aamer Hussein (UK), Sim Yee Chiang (Singapore), Dylan Suher (USA), Alex Tan (USA) and Adrian West (USA)

Art Director: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)

Editor-at-large, Bahrain: Amal Sarhan
Editor-at-large, Bulgaria: Andriana Hamas
Editor-at-large, China: Hongyu Jasmine Zhu
Editor-at-large, Czechia: Frances Jackson
Editor-at-large, Guatemala: José García Escobar
Editor-at-large, Hong Kong: Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan
Editors-at-large, India: Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre, Zohra Salih, and Sayani Sarkar
Editor-at-large, Italy: Veronica Gisondi
Editor-at-large, Kenya: Wambua Muindi
Editor-at-large, Nepal: Alfa M. Shakya
Editor-at-large, Nigeria: Bethlehem Attfield
Editor-at-large, North Macedonia: Sofija Popovska
Editor-at-large, Pakistan: Daman Khalid
Editors-at-large, Palestine: Carol Khoury and Shatha Abd El Latif
Editor-at-large, Puerto Rico: Alejandra Quintana Arocho
Editor-at-large, Philippines: Alton Melvar M. Dapanas
Editor-at-large, Romania and Moldova: MARGENTO
Editor-at-large, USA: Mary Noorlander
Editor-at-large, Uzbekistan: Filiip Noubel
Editor-at-large, Vietnam: Thuy Dinh


Masthead for Issue July 2026

Fiction, Drama, and Interview: Lee Yew Leong
Poetry: M.L. Martin
Nonfiction: Willem Marx
Visual: Heather Green
Outsiders and The Reverse Side Special Features: Lee Yew Leong
Illustrations and Cover: Alice Yu Deng

Assistant Managing Editor (supervising Assistant Editors): Sam Bowden

Assistant Managing Editors (supervising Editors-at-Large): Kathryn Raver, Veronica Gisondi, and Sofija Popovska

Assistant Managing Editor (overseeing issue production): Ella Dailey

Chief Executive Assistant: Dina Famin
 
Senior Executive Assistants: Meenakshi Ajit, Michelle Clemente, and Julie Shi

Executive Assistant: Haeri Lee

Blog Editors: Xiao Yue Shan, Bella Creel, and Meghan Racklin

Art Director: Lee Yew Leong

Chief Copy Editor: Rachel Stanyon

Senior Copy Editors: Jennifer Busch, Caitlin McKie, Mia Ruf, and Maggie Wang

Copy Editors: Ruairi Casey, Megan Kruger, Hannah Lund, Matilde Ribeiro, Grace Roodenrys, Max Schiewe, Sam Steinmetz, and Nahrin Youkhanna

Technical Manager: József Szabó

Director of Outreach: Georgina Fooks

English Social Media: Ruwa Alhayek, Arla Hoxha, Sebastian Kettner, Huey-En Ooi, and Grace Wilkins

French Social Media: Filip Noubel

Spanish Social Media: Sergio Serrano

Graphic Designer: Michael Laungjessadakun, Hannah Rosenthal, and Grace Wilkins

Digital Editors: Julia Maria, Savitri Asokan, and Haajar Abu Ismail

Marketing Manager: Kate Lofthouse

Director, Educational Arm: Sarah Nasar

Educational Arm Assistants: Mary Hillis, Marissa Lydon, Devi Sastry, and Sonakshi Srivastava

Book Club Manager: Carol Khoury

Asymptote would like to acknowledge the support of Lena Moses-Schmitt, Violeta Radkova, and Jan Musil.

For their generous donations this past quarter, our heartfelt thanks go too to Alexander Dickow, Colleen Grogan, Daniel Hahn, Guðrún Gísladóttir, Hamahang Translation, Ian Chung, Jane Costlow, Jared Davis, Jeffrey Boyle, Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Lynn O'Neal, Mark Cohen, Martin Ingebrigtsen, Reuven Eitan, Sharon Wood, Thomas Carroll, Tolunay Savas, Velina Manolova.

We'd also like to welcome Christopher Lund and Diana Senechal, new sustaining members who joined us this past quarter.