Juan Gómez Bárcena
Translated by Andrea Rosenberg

You go to the window to watch the Neighbor leave. He’s accompanied by two men. They’re wearing hats pulled down tight over their ears and a sort of kerchief or scarf that leaves only their eyes exposed. But you recognize them anyway: you’ve seen them many times under this very window, carrying their portfolios and their leather briefcases. They look like they’re in a hurry, and the Neighbor is practically dragging his leg as he limps along. You watch them head down the street toward the river.

They disappear.

From the other side of the wall, the voice of the Girl again. She switches from world capitals to multiplication tables, where she seems more self-assured and more mechanical, and from there to the right and left tributaries of the Danube, and finally to a long … Read More »

Carlos Gamerro 

They lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, both bachelors; lay together; had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire; the same clothes and cloak etc. between them.

—John Aubrey, Brief Lives

ONE 

October to November 1612

Letter from John Fletcher to Francis Beaumont, 31st October 1612.

My dear Damon,

I began work on our Cardenio yesterday with Will, or rather on Will with Cardenio, for I was forced to play the peddler and urge its many virtues and beauties, all but begging him to help me write it: to this state your desertion has brought me. The going was not easy, and he is far from won over yet. The story we so often read to one another with such delight and so dreamed of bringing on the … Read More »

Gabriela Poma

The sleeping pills had finally worn off.

Her left eye opened, a slit, and she remembered to breathe.

Yo no entiendo nada de esto.

The world seemed on its side, wrong, as she viewed it then.  Everything around her was new and nothing really belonged to her and, yet, she had to make it all familiar.

She scanned the room—

a recliner next to the window, the television still on, the armoire, two lamps, the ordinary bedding, the awful green carpet, the silver-streaked wallpaper with silhouettes of sleek bamboo shafts.

She had taken an inventory of all the things in the bedroom and repeated the order back to herself over and over again.  Then, she noticed her rings scattered like rolled dice on one of the bedside tables.  It was all there they way she’d left it the night before.

Her eyes … Read More »

Edgardo Cozarinsky
translated by Cayley Taylor

It starts, always, in the temples, an almost imperceptible throbbing at first, and in the precise moment he acknowledges it, that pulsing starts to grow until he feels as if his head is going to explode and his vision gets cloudy and the distance between him and the objects surrounding him wavers and the arm that he stretches out for the phone is slow in reaching it and the emergency medical service number doesn’t show up in the list though he knows that he’s added it to the phone’s memory. But it’s not just the head. The chest replicates the throbbing of the temples, the thorax narrows and the ribs press down on something that he can only think to call heart, he can’t breathe and the air doesn’t enter his open mouth. He … Read More »

Carol Bensimon
translated by Adam Morris

They so happened to be born in a rather small town between two more or less larger ones, something they couldn’t get used to because it meant they had the whole highway to stare at. And they stared. And it so happened that on the shoulder of the highway was a store run from out of a house built in nineteen thirty-something, its front steps a set of bleachers for the girls. They’d sit there, all afternoon. Some cars went by, another stopped. Titi let her thin legs stick out onto the sidewalk, her mosquito bites scabbed into little cones of blood from so much scratching. Her t-shirt went down to her thighs, if you could call them thighs. The traveler begged her pardon and went inside. Titi hid her laughter. Lina, three years … Read More »

from the future Spanish of Mario Bellatin
translated by David Shook

Josué’s mother was blind. Not always. She lost her eyes one at a time, starting at about age 49, in people years. That’s seven years old for a Chihuahua, which, though a little early, isn’t exceptionally unusual. The process began with a slight milkiness at the perimeter of her bulging left eye. Aw, she’s got cataracts, the show circuit groomers cooed. Know-nothings with no creativity, no curiosity. She had uveitis. Her ophthalmologist explained the disease by making a drawing on a whiteboard: tiny triangles, which she explained were the eye’s pumps, shedding off the eye’s regular waste emissions—mostly a solution of minerals and salts. The regular wastes were represented by tiny squares that looked like grains of rough-cut salt, maybe Himalayan. The ophthalmologist prescribed two medicines: … Read More »

Mario Bellatin
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

1- BLACK BALL RELOADED

Author’s first look at the bande dessinée Black Ball

Yesterday I received some information about the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal. I replied that toward the end of his life he’d seemed unable to bear the too loud a solitude in which he lived. So he’d climbed out onto a window ledge on an upper floor of the nursing home they’d put him in and leaped into the void. The response I received said that during his last years he’d been obsessed with the bustling pigeons he could see through the windows of the ward as he lay in bed. Maybe he wanted to turn into a bird, said the message. Maybe that’s why he’d attempted to fly, as if he were one of them. The person writing to me was my psychoanalyst. … Read More »

Szilvia Molnar 

1. I come home to a burnt-down house in Lund. You’re back in Malmö. I’m watching my parents gather half-scorched photographs in the garden, like raking autumn leaves before winter. Their faces are covered in soot. In despair, I take my dirty luggage from the island of Nagu to Russia, where there’s neither emo nor emotion left to feel. In St. Petersburg I buy a typewriter, one of those Smith Corona’s I’ve always dreamed of and I steal a stool from a hardware store. I choose a busy street and sit down to type. People walk by and ask me for a quote, an affirmation or a recipe for princesstårta. For the recipe I make sure to add There’s no princess without the marzipan. In exchange for my typing people leave me their … Read More »

Ramiro Sanchiz
Translated by Audrey Hall

On the outskirts of Punta de Piedra, there is a bar a good distance beyond the last line of houses. From the untidy plain arises what is essentially a cube of gray concrete with small windows and a parking lot. Actually, to simulate the impression it always made on me when I looked at it—with the houses of Punta de Piedra in the distance and the plain stripped down to what the universe must have looked like hundreds of millions of years ago—I would have to resort to a simple, coarse, improbable image: an art nouveau building on some remote, uninhabited planet.

My grandfather used to go round there on Friday nights, but I wasn’t allowed to go with him. So one day in February 1990, my friend Marcos and I hopped on our bikes … Read More »

Nuno Ramos
translated by Adam Morris

Geology Lesson

There’s a layer of dust covering things, protecting them from us. Dark sooty powder, fragments of salt and seaweed, tons of grainy matter that goes crossing the ocean and transforms itself into transparent fibers deposited little by little to preserve that which remained underneath. Almost nothing has been thought about this phenomenon. It’s probably all an enormous camouflage operation, of equalizing a remote signal that we’d easily perceive in the absence of this mountain of tiny accretions. Something inside of things is being disguised, hidden at whatever price, and even this extract of stone, earth, and dry lava where we walked, built our cabins and birthed our children seems to be there to wrap something that tends toward the center. The endless aggregation of Gravity, of mass falling upon mass, matter embracing matter … Read More »