Stanley Bill

In the late 1920s somebody shot and killed a Ukrainian railway worker named Mykhaylo Marusiak on a street in Buenos Aires. The date is unknown. The circumstances are unclear. The man who pulled the trigger was a fellow Ukrainian railway man from the same southern corner of what was then Poland. The incident probably took place somewhere in an immigrant quarter of the city, which in those days teemed with fresh European arrivals hoping to ride what would later prove to be the last wave of Argentine prosperity before the Great Depression and the subsequent decades of decline. Long before Ukraine came into existence as an independent state, Marusiak was one of thousands of ethnic Ukrainians from the poorest regions of interwar Poland to sail for Argentina in search of economic opportunity. A bullet in Buenos Aires … Read More »

Ernesto Hernández Busto
translated by Heather Cleary 

The future is always a lie. We have too much influence over it.
— Elias Canetti

I.

It all began in September of 1991, when a friend (let’s call him I.) showed up at my place with the news that we’d be able to leave the country a few days later. I vaguely recall that we celebrated (despite the superstition about doing so in advance) and then went for a deliberately nostalgic walk around the city. I realize now that I don’t have a clear memory of that last stroll, of where we were, exactly, as though all that premeditation had generated the opposite effect: an overly illuminated screen on which we could barely make out blurred figures and places.

In another country, our departure would not have been anything special. In … Read More »

Liliana Colanzi
translated by Chris Meade

Once, when I was a little girl, I saw a pig being killed. It was summer. Flies were launching themselves against the windows. I used to like to chew ice, and in the afternoon I would go up to the balcony with a glass brimming with little cubes to watch the neighbor, Mr. Casiano, breaking down old furniture with a handsaw on his patio. But not that day. I had just positioned myself against the bannister when a shriek struck me head-on. Mr. Casiano was crushing the creature with hammer blows. The pig howled—or grunted? or roared?—and ran for its life, half its face destroyed, but it was tethered by the neck to a starfruit tree and the rope only allowed it to run in frantic, ever-shortening circles around the tree. Mr. Casiano paused … Read More »

Ken Harvey

Gordon’s cold had gone deeper, his breathing raspy and heavy.  He had just made an appointment to see his doctor later that afternoon when Ellen Joyce, who worked in the rectory at St. Luke’s Church, phoned him.  She told him that at Sodality’s Brunch that morning, Father Jim had stood to thank the women for their service when he was stricken by a massive heart attack. He died before the ambulance arrived.

“It’s hard to know what to say,” Gordon said, wondering how he had managed to put the words together.  His body grew warm as if his cold had spiked a fever.  He removed his wire-framed glasses and pressed his fingertips against his eyelids. When he heard Ellen sniffling, he tried to think of something comforting to say, but all he could come … Read More »

A GIRL AT CHRISTMAS

The choir that cannot die.
Fish and fennel. Snow. Christmas
tree, clover and pomegranate.

For all she’s gladdened: milk
which is love dreaming in one
hand; clefts of clementine stain

the other. They cannot die,
these tribal ornaments, coral
joy, battering ceramic, peach

bones. Scotch bonnet seeds.
She then belts her savage choir
and dances herself into a festival.

*

VERS DE SOCIÉTÉ

Some meager talk of Larkin
over quiche and pâté, olives
the proclaimed ragamuffin
picked at as though our lives;

circumspect, the neutral host
blanched at pills and diaphragm,
shook her clipped head of frost,
insist he please changed from

that cold brute, to where life
is modest, the islands, perhaps,
not this social phalanx;
but he answered, none too vexed:

that’s the drivel of some bitch;
a gulf caved into her face;
the champagne flattened to piss;
cardiac breath, no one flaked,

waiting for blood on the ice,
an extremity, voice rifted
on voice; burred, tender, polite
in one spur, like crisped pomfret

forked in the … Read More »

Victoria Liendo
translated by Victoria Lampard

To Charles Coustille,
guilty of making me love France,
he who declares himself innocent of everything.

Libraries very much resemble churches: there are some that can make you feel even closer to God. There are so many libraries in Paris that it’s hard to decide which to visit on a daily basis. There’s your neighborhood library, your university library, your country’s library, the Scandinavian countries’ libraries—more modern—the Grandes Écoles, the famous ones like Saint-Geneviève, the cool ones like Beaubourg, and then there is the official, unquestioned Cathedral of French Wisdom, immense, solemn, silent: the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Against all expectations, the lofty, serious BnF is the only place in which someone as restless as myself is able to sit down and study.

Before the main branch of the library was at Richelieu, near the Opera and the … Read More »

On Carlos Labbé’s Piezas secretas contra el mundo (Periférica 2014)

Samuel Rutter

A recent interview in El País identified Carlos Labbé (Santiago de Chile, 1977) as a writer at the forefront of a generation returning to the complex relationship between avant-garde literature and political engagement. In keeping with this characterization, Labbé’s latest novel, Piezas secretas contra el mundo, published in March by Editorial Periférica is an ambitious declaration of principles for a new understanding of the novel in the twenty-first century.

Those familiar with Labbé’s growing and challenging body of work, beginning with the hypertext novel Pentagonal, will recognise in this latest novel some of the tropes the author continues to address. There is a particularly textual nature to the worlds Labbé creates, where the acts of reading and writing form an essential part of the fabric of reality in which … Read More »

Thibault de Montaigu
translated by Lara Vergnaud

Some people will no doubt feel this work lacks precision and that it’s impossible to write a decent book about a criminal investigation while remaining comfortably settled at home sipping a Diet Coke as you watch rain fall outside the window. It so happens that I’ve always worked like this, preferring to take a back seat for the benefit of my readers. I find the telephone more than sufficient and only venture out of my house to interview the main protagonists of my stories. Except, in this specific case, there aren’t any. Klein and Vasconcelos have been dead for a long time and I don’t have any other choice but to rely on the copious documentation about them that’s been provided me. Someone will object that I didn’t gather this documentation and that … Read More »