Catalina Mena's manifesto confronts the dilemmas facing women forced to choose between private household duties and public endeavors. Listen to Catalina Mena read "The Head of Household Manifesto" in the original Spanish. And if the Head of Household were to draft her manifesto, it would be in the absence of a form that can hold her. And because this same absence left her adrift. Stamped like a Chilean census form. A form that called the Head of Household a national hero. But that...

A girl of seventeen agrees to marry a gringo on their first date. Nothing in this impulsive start to their marriage hints at the coming misfortunes that will tear them from each other and themselves.    Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart. Hosea, 4:11   He said: I know you. You used to live in Ch, near the big port—isn’t your name Carla? I told him he was right except for the name, recognizing the same roughness in his accent as those...

Climbing into bed with her raconteuse grandmother, a young woman anxiously expects another of the old lady’s stories of a bygone Santiago. Instead, she discovers a physical deformity that provokes a reflection on the stories our scars tell of us.     My grandmother had no belly button. I found that out one night when I went into her room without knocking. It was late, I’d woken up from a bad dream and, to feel safe, I walked down the hall, thinking I’d get into...

In this Indonesian short story, one baby’s fate is entwined with that of the nation.   For the first time in his long career as a biographer, Abraham Yusra felt that he was being put to the test. Someone special had asked him to write the biography of a baby and he felt that he couldn’t refuse. But what could he say about a baby that had just come into this turning world? What would the child know of life? How would one begin the narrative? Abraham Yusra looked out the...

In this Indonesian science fiction tale, love is intergalactic.   There were big eyes everywhere in the darkness. Darkness that seemed to go on forever. Then every one of the eyes opened, dispelling the dark. It was 11 p.m. at a distance of 25.3 light-years. The coordinate was fifty-seven degrees south of the constellation of Taurus. Tiansun stood idly facing in the direction of the enormous star, El Nath. His hands shuffled a broom back and forth, sweeping up the very fine dust...

In this second installment of Sang Young Park's novella, a failed filmmaker finds himself onstage with his archrival. Read the first installment here.   When we opened our eyes, we were lying in a single bed. Wangsha was the one to let go first and turn to me. This isn’t what I wanted. He seemed conflicted. Then, he spoke firmly. I’m not that kind of person. What kind of person is that? The kind that does it with men. He hadn’t wanted to...

The leader of a resistance movement chooses death in outer space over prison torture.   It could have been any year at all—once again—chestnut trees flamed like lanterns over the gates to the wharf in springtime and settling along the beach was a haze that broke in and lifted up the water colored pink to spray the sky. The city lay stretched out flat and weary and like other summers it let itself be driven to a way of breathing other than its own; the roar of the...

In this excerpt, a group of musicians debate the glamorization of violence and drug-dealing in rap music.   We should go, said the guitarist after a while. I don’t know how much time had passed, but it was enough for the full realization to hit us that there was nothing we could do, nothing at all. We saw the paramedics come and deal with the body, someone else was looking after the driver, and several times I was about to open my mouth and say something about how I’d met...

In this first installment of Sang Young Park's novella, a filmmaker enlists to earn money for an independent film and finds himself caught up in an even more personal project. Read the second installment here.  Listen to Sang Young Park read "The Tears of an Unknown Artist, or Zaytun Pasta" in the original Korean.   It started off as another quiet, boring day. I sat in the rundown office of a queer film production company in the Jongno district, going around the usual...

In this excerpt from Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station, forthcoming in 2019 from Tilted Axis Press, a homeless man remembers a parental failure.     There’s that sound again. That sound— I hear it. But I don’t know if it’s in my ears or in my mind. I don’t know if it’s inside me or outside. I don’t know when it was, or who it was either. Is that important? Was it important? Who was it? *** I used to think life was like...

Rainbow Bird tells the story of Katsuya, a young Okinawan man longing to escape his life in the criminal underworld of the island where he grew up. Set in 1995 shortly after three U.S. servicemen stationed in Okinawa kidnapped and raped a twelve-year-old girl, the story unfolds against a backdrop of protests and mass demonstrations. Katsuya’s job is to force women to prostitute themselves while he photographs the transaction, then blackmails the clients. When his newest girl,...

When a lawyer and his interpreter visit a Hazara woman in a Japanese prison, they discover there are questions she can't—or won't—answer.   Mr. Tanaka filled in two copies of the visitors’ application form and passed them to the man on the other side of the small reception window. A few minutes later, a heavy iron door opened in front of us, and a tall, sturdy policeman appeared. He was almost too well built to be Japanese, his muscles bursting out...

A mugging reveals a man robbed of more than his money. For Edgard Hasselman Of all my acquaintances, I’d known this young man the longest. Forged on the street, in brief encounters in the cafés, our relations became increasingly friendly. At first, I took him for an invariably jovial person, indifferent to the more inconsequential things of this world, a skeptic in his own way; but before long, beneath this polite mask, I began to realize he was something of a whiner, a...

In the following three micro-stories from Aflitos by Jean Wyllys, men and women handle defeat with toxic—even murderous—reactions. The Course of Happiness The room in disarray, two used condoms strewn on the floor. The sun, which entered through the wide open window, aggravated her headache. She tasted bitterness in her mouth and heard the shower running. She quickly ran to the bathroom and came across a masculine silhouette behind the box. The still unknown person...

In Ariel Urquiza's short story, a young man is forced to deliver drugs on his mother's behalf, but after arriving at his clients' party, he finds little motive for celebration.   “What do you want?” Gabriel asked when he opened the door. “I’m Jonathan,” he said. “Renata’s son.” “Wow, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve gotten so big, you’re almost as tall as me. Come on in. It took you a while, I was just...

In a sleepless night, an old man remembers how he and his wife have spent a lifetime speaking the language of feet.   One sleepless night typical of the old and insomniac, Mr. Thuyết suddenly remembers the eyes of his daughter when she was three or four years old. For decades, he has kept that evening in near-complete oblivion without once recalling the eyes of the child who was always attached to him, the eyes of the child who would lie with her head in his arms,...

A Vietnamese woman visiting her ex-husband's family in the Netherlands remembers the many men she's loved in her life.    At fourteen I fell in love with a man, a writer, older than me by thirteen years, already with a family. He resembled a young Anthony Perkins, that guitar-playing wanderer who roams the forest and happens upon the doe eyes of Audrey Hepburn in the foliage. At twenty-one I lost my virgin body to a person who specialized in the old lục...

Trần Dần’s novel, Crossroads and Lampposts, is set in Hanoi in late 1954 and 1955, immediately following the withdrawal of the French and the takeover by the Viet Minh under the terms of the Geneva Accords. Duong, the main character in the novel, is under suspicion of being a collaborator with the former French regime. In this excerpt from chapter three, Trinh (aka Com), Duong’s wife, talks about life under the new regime and her husband’s state of mind....

In this surrealistic piece, a sleeping man wakes up to find a visitor watching him.    He comes to find me on a day I don’t remember, by the time I’ve gotten up he is already sitting on the other side of the table to watch as I eat my breakfast. He does not say a word as I stir the coffee, the spoon’s collision with the side of the glass making a dispassionate clang. I’ve been sleeping for a while, not sure how long a while, he must have arrived as I...

A frustrated wife and mother finds life in a fishbowl instructive in this story translated from the Mongolian.   I've been in here for exactly one year. My once fair and delicate skin, the envy of all the other ladies, has hardened into scales mottled with red and pink splotches. A year, exactly one year. People have thought that I have been a fish for exactly one year. Regardless of what other people say, what really matters to me is that three hundred and sixty-five...