January 2012: Apocalypse

Image: Lori Nix, "Mall" 2010, Chromogenic Print, 40"x55," Courtesy of Lori Nix and ClampArt Gallery

With a nod to the doomsday prophecy, we're launching 2012 with writing about apocalypse. In two riffs on the Old Testament, André-Marcel Adamek builds a Belgian ark, while Fernando Paiva eulogizes the Creator. Ofir Touché Gafla counts down the hours in a runaway city. Sławomir Mrożek awaits the end of days at McDonald's. Hector G. Oesterheld and Solano Lopez depict a deadly snowfall in Buenos Aires. Gyrðir Elíasson sees banned books in Iceland's future. Antônio Xerxenesky exposes a conspiracy to rewrite a famous ending. And Mexico’s Ambar Past provides an incantatory oracle. We trust you’ll enjoy these apocalyptic visions; and if not, well, it’s not the end of the world. Elsewhere, Luis Nuño slips out for a smoke, Juan Villoro misses connections, and Alber Sabanoglu heads to sea.


Also in this Issue

Fiction by Juan Villoro

Holding Pattern

I’ve had to sleep in hotels where you feel like you’re wasting a good opportunity to commit suicide.

Translated from Spanish by Lisa M. Dillman bilingual version

Fiction by Luis Nuño

And If You See That I Don’t Come Back

I put my cigarette out on a hand that held an empty briefcase of shiny leather.

Translated from Spanish by Maureen Shaughnessy bilingual version

Fiction by Alber Sabanoglu

To the Islands

Under her feet, the boat was shaking and creaking as bigger, stronger waves were beginning to hit it.

Translated from Turkish by Alber Sabanoglu bilingual version

Book Reviews

Dubravka Ugresic’s “Karaoke Culture”

Reviewed by Jean Harris

Part of the allure is for the amateur to wrest the microphone away from the stars and, for a moment, to take their place in the limelight.

Tomás Eloy Martínez’s “Purgatory”

Reviewed by Anderson Tepper

On a certain level, "Purgatory" is a metaphorical ghost story—a meditation on loss, invisibility, and vanishing

Fiction by Ofir Touche Gafla

Velocity

I wanted the daughter who quit doing drugs cold turkey, at age ten.

Translated from Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann bilingual version

Fiction by André-Marcel Adamek

The Ark

Crates of poultry are piling up in my yard, my attic’s an aviary, my cellar writhes with reptiles

Translated from French by Edward Gauvin

by Héctor G. Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López

The Eternonaut

Image description

Death, continuously falling in tiny, luminous flakes. The nightmare snowfall that had erased almost all life...

Translated from Spanish by Erica Mena

Fiction by Antônio Xerxenesky

Seizing Cervantes

The plan involved gradually rewriting "Don Quixote" over the years, so that no one would notice and collective memories would forget the details. Implausible?

Translated from Portuguese by Kim M. Hastings

Poetry by Ambar Past

The Eagle

You close your eyes so as not to see/ How the cadavers hang from a kapok tree.

Translated from Spanish by Samantha Schnee bilingual version

Fiction by Sławomir Mrożek

Ketchup

I burned down the McDonald’s, for the sake of my life

Translated from Polish by Garry Malloy bilingual version

Fiction by Fernando Paiva

God’s Obituary

Curiously, in recent years God became the most outspoken critic of his own work

Translated from Portuguese by Brent Alan James bilingual version

Fiction by Gyrðir Elíasson

House No. 451

She finds my writing bizarre; no one does it, especially not in a town like this.

Translated from Icelandic by Victoria Cribb bilingual version

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