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April 2012

Sex

If love makes the world go 'round, sex is what keeps it spinning, and this month we're reeling with writing on this most universal of themes. In these stories sex is both subject and object, cause and effect.  See how Fatima al-Ali, Nadine Bismuth, Rubem Fonseca, Mar Gómez Glez, Eduardo Halfon, Fernando Iwasaki, Hanoch Levin, Giulio Mozzi, Felix Palma, Adrian Sangeorzan, Care Santos, and Sebastiano Vassalli address the facts (and fictions) of life. We trust you'll be seduced. Elsewhere, we present Chinese writers Zhu Wen and Xu Zechen, and the second installment of Sakumi Tayama's “Hole in the Garden.”

Throwing Out the Baby
By Xu Zechen
It’s just a dead kid, what are you making such a fuss about?
Translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman
Beyond this Darkness and this Silence
By Care Santos
The majority of women can’t bear the idea of sleeping with someone they can’t see.
Translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Multilingual
Tana
By Giulio Mozzi
The tongues of flesh were captivating as they rose and fell, row by row, like a wave, the wings moving only slightly.
Translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris
Multilingual
To Troy, Helen
By Fernando Iwasaki
She had undressed me then as if she were peeling a piece of fruit.
Translated from Spanish by Jeremy Osner
Multilingual
The Hunchback and Botticelli’s Venus
By Rubem Fonseca
A hunchback either becomes impotent or burns in a fire of lasciviousness that never cools for a single instant, like the heat of hell.
Translated from Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers
Multilingual
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