Visible: Text + Image: 6 (Calico) - Softcover

Ndiaye, Marie; Gerber Bicecci, Verónica; Yi, Sangwoo; Flores Sánchez, Rodrigo; Sznajderman, Monika; Monchoachi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1949641376 ISBN 13: 9781949641370

Publisher: Two Lines Press, 2022

Synopsis

Brimming with enigmatic photographs, future memes, and mud drawings, Visible showcases six genre-defying works from around the world that raise questions about the relationship between how we see, how we read, and how we write in "the age of the calligram." In a rewrite of René Magritte's "Les mots et les images," Verónica Gerber Bicecci (translated by Christina MacSweeney) considers "images that think" and the internet. Marie NDiaye's "Step of a Feral Cat," translated by Victoria Baena, follows an academic, inspired by a portrait of an entertainer, as she walks the slippery space between literary ambition and exploitation. Monika Sznajderman (translated by Scotia Gilroy) assembles a fractured family history through photographs of a time she can never possibly know: "the pre-Holocaust world." Focusing on those whose stories have yet to be told--the black Cuban singer Maria Martinez, a Polish family murdered in World War II, workers at a noodle shop in Busan, and the tallest man in recorded history--Visible asks us to interrogate the thin traces of shifting meaning we find in and between words and images, and how we can change that meaning for the future.

About this title

About the Authors

Marie NDiaye as born in 1976 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She's received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française.

Verónica Gerber Bicecci is a visual artist who writes. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she has published several books, including Conjunto vacío, which was awarded the 3rd International Aura Estrada Literature Prize. She also curated a selection of artworks from La Caixa Collection, exhibited in Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2020. She presently teaches in Mexico City on the SOMA art program, a space dedicated to cultural and artistic exchange.

Yi SangWoo (b. 1988) made his debut when he was awarded the 2011 Munhakdongne New Writer in Fiction Prize. His stories have been collected in 프리즘 [Prism] (Munhakdongne, 2015) and warp (Workroom Press, 2017). His most recent book 두 사람이 걸어가 [Two people walk by] (Moonji, 2020) collects interlinked stories together into a long form and reflects his ongoing interest in exploring the visual, aural, and formal facets of the story and the book.

Rodrigo Flores Sánchez (Mexico City, 1977) is a poet interested in experimentation, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary inquiry. He is the author of five poetry collections: Ventana cerrada (2020), Tianguis (2013), Zalagarda (2011), estimado cliente (2005 and 2007), and baterías (2006). He and Dolores Dorantes co-wrote Intervenir/Intervene (Ugly Duckling Presse, translated by Jen Hofer). His poems were collected in the two-author volume Flores + Espina alongside the work of Uruguayan poet Eduardo Espina.

Monika Sznajderman has been the head of Czarne, Poland's leading publisher of literary non-fiction, since 1996. She is a cultural anthropologist, author, and editor of numerous works of cultural criticism. Her father, Marek Sznajderman (whose story, among others, is told in The Pepper Forgers) was a renowned cardiologist, and her grandfather (also in the book) was a renowned neurologist. Her husband is Andrzej Stasiuk, one of Poland's best-known writers of fiction and literary journalism.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I've searched for the book, but I can't find it. It had thick covers, as far as I can remember, but but maybe I'm wrong. The book, in English, contained reviews of horror movies. I'd return to it again and again in the apartment where I lived then. I can see myself setting it down on the rug, opening it wherever the pages fell, and starting intently at the pictures for a few minutes. I couldn't make sense of the reviews, but I was transfixed by the photos, two in particular. Today, after nearly forty years, I still look at the face of a girl split by an axe and the figure of a man in a raincoat being eaten by rodents. Some images are difficult to forget; or, better put, they're recreated again and again in our memories. Some windows change shape. (from Closed Window by Rodrigo Flores Sánchez, translated by Robin Myers)

Edition details

• Publisher: Two Lines Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1949641376
• ISBN 13: 9781949641370
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180
• Editor: Coolidge Sarah