By the time we hear it, it is already too late. The execution is today. In Plato’s Crito, the words arrive not as spectacle but as fact, stripping philosophy to its most unforgiving question: what does it mean to remain faithful to one’s principles when they can no longer be separated from the fate of the body? This Spring 2026 issue begins from that moment, following the many forms “execution” takes as it moves through language, the body, and the social world, including within a Special Feature on Slovenian Literature, organized in partnership with the Slovenian Book Agency, which also arranged for a Slovenian guest artist—the brilliant Matija Medved—to illustrate not only his compatriots’ work but also the entire edition, made up of never-before-published writing from 30 countries. 

In its most literal sense, execution is the end to which certain lives in these pages are consigned. This inevitability shadows the poems of Osip Mandelstam, written under a regime that would ultimately destroy him, and finds a stark contemporary echo in Maksym “Dali” Kryvtsov’s The Firing Trench, where proximity to death sharpens attention to the smallest details of existence. Even in the more oblique lyric meditations of Rainer Maria Rilke, mortality is not a distant afterthought but a condition that shapes perception itself. This sense of a foreclosed horizon is given explicit articulation in David Spector’s “Twelve Months, Two Tongues, One War,” which recalls a proverb suggesting that confession might spare one’s life, only to overturn it with the brutal truth: in Soviet prisons, people confessed and were executed anyway. It is also refracted through our unusual Visual offering, Typo-Translations of John Keats, in which artists reimagine Keats’s meditation on mortality, “When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be,” not by resolving that fear but by transfiguring it, carrying the poem across forms, media, and imagined worlds where the awareness of ending becomes the condition for new expression.

From this outward violence, the issue turns to forms that unfold less visibly but no less decisively. In Kim Hye-jin’s “Neighborhood People,” a minor incident calcifies into collective judgment, the surrounding community closing ranks until a couple finds itself gradually erased from the life it sought to enter. The violence here is procedural, carried out through rumor, surveillance, and the quiet consensus of neighbors. In Mich Vinson’s thrilling contribution to our recurring Outsiders Feature, the stakes are more intimate but no less severe: in a society where homosexuality is policed, gay men seek out a ritual that erases their capacity for love—“cut” from the liver, as the story puts it, at the place where desire is said to originate. Elsewhere in Fiction, Lisa Owen’s “Orphea” presses against the finality of death itself, testing the limits of what loss can bear. What if death were not an absolute boundary but a condition to be negotiated or deferred? In Owen’s telling, the urge to recover what has been taken becomes an act of defiance against the terms set by mortality. A different kind of fatedness emerges in Tomo Podstenšek’s “Surface Tension,” where a letter sent in haste cannot be recalled, setting off a chain of events that gathers force precisely because it cannot be undone. Yet the story leans into comedy, each attempted correction only deepening the farce.

That story belongs to our Slovenian Literature Feature, where questions of consequence are explored with particular intensity by some of the most significant voices in contemporary Slovenian writing. In Dušan Šarotar’s Star Chart, a work of quiet authority, the afterlife of historical violence is traced through memory, following a rural family’s intimate world until it is broken by deportation to Auschwitz. Brane Mozetič, long a central figure in European queer poetry, writes with a visceral immediacy that binds eros to fragility: in his poems, the body is never secure, desire unfolding in a space where it may at any moment be interrupted, dismembered, or returned altered beyond recognition. In TOXIC, on the other hand, Eva Mahkovic, translated by 2019 Close Approximations winner Olivia Hellewell, pioneers a new form of autowriting that captures the restless, recursive textures of contemporary subjectivity. Meanwhile, Aleš Šteger’s Fire moves with incantatory force, where the act of creation is inseparable from destruction, where to speak is already to set something alight. Across these works, what begins as possibility hardens into consequence, each gesture carrying within it the spark of its own irrevocable end.

What remains, once the ending is no longer hypothetical, is not only how such conditions are withstood, but how thought continues from within them. In Martina Bařinová’s interview with Luis Othoniel Rosa (tr. Katie Marya), Animal Spiral—a collaborative novel written by thirteen(!) authors—is described as emerging from “the dystopian present,” a world so dark and violent that imagining another order feels as necessary as it is terrifying. A related unease surfaces in Sarah Gear’s interview with Hiromi Kawakami (tr. Audrey State), whose reflections on technological dependence and deferred consequence reveal how readily the future is relinquished in the name of convenience. Invoking Antonio Gramsci’s “time of monsters,” Rosa suggests that history has entered a decisive hour, when the old structures no longer hold and the new have yet to take form. If earlier works attend to the moment when consequence closes in, these conversations ask what it means to remain intellectually and imaginatively alive within that closure.

It is precisely this space—where imagination holds fast under pressure—that Asymptote has sought to sustain over the past fifteen years, insisting on the necessity of literary exchange even as the conditions for it grow more precarious. If this issue has lit a spark in you, carry it forward: follow us on Facebook, X, Instagram, and Threads, subscribe to our newsletter, bookmark our daily blog, submit original English-language work or translations into English to our latest Special Feature call (deadline: June 15), join our book club on the occasion of our 100th(!) milestone title, and—most importantly—consider becoming a sustaining or masthead member from as little as five dollars a month. Remember: everything that endures is what we choose to keep alive.

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief

Editorial Team for Issue April 2026

Editor-in-Chief: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)

Assistant Managing Editors: Sam Bowden (USA), Ella Dailey (Belgium/USA), Veronica Gisondi (Italy), Sofija Popovska (North Macedonia), Kathryn Raver (France/USA), and Sarah Roth (USA)

Section Editors:
Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)
Heather Green (USA)
M.L. Martin (USA)
Willem Marx (Italy/UK)
Caridad Svich (USA/UK)

Senior Assistant Editors: Sophie Eliza Benbelaid (UK) and Chiara Gilberti (Germany/Italy)

Assistant Editors: Bernard Capinpin (Philippines), Sabrina Fountain (USA), Danielle Janess (USA), David Pavlas (Slovenia), Olivia Wolgemuth (USA), Catherine Xin Xin Yu (Canada/Italy), Daniel Yadin (USA), Chris Yeung (Hong Kong/USA), Junyi Zhou (USA), and Lin Chia-Wei (Taiwan) 

Assistant Interview Editor: Sarah Gear

Contributing Editors: Ellen Elias-Bursac (USA), Aamer Hussein (UK), Sim Yee Chiang (Singapore), Dylan Suher (USA), Alex Tan (USA/Singapore) and Adrian West (USA)

Art Director: Lee Yew Leong (Thailand/Singapore)

Editor-at-large, Bulgaria: Andriana Hamas
Editor-at-large, China: Hongyu Jasmine Zhu
Editor-at-large, Guatemala: José García Escobar
Editor-at-large, Hong Kong: Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan
Editors-at-large, India: Zohra Salih and Sayani Sarkar
Editor-at-large, Italy: Veronica Gisondi
Editor-at-large, Kenya: Wambua Muindi
Editor-at-large, Nigeria: Bethlehem Attfield
Editor-at-large, North Macedonia: Sofija Popovska
Editors-at-large, Palestine: Carol Khoury and Shatha Abd El Latif
Editor-at-large, Puerto Rico: Alejandra Quintana Arocho
Editor-at-large, Philippines: Alton Melvar M. Dapanas
Editor-at-large, Romania and Moldova: MARGENTO
Editor-at-large, Sweden: Linnea Gradin
Editor-at-large, USA: Mary Noorlander


Masthead for Issue April 2026

Fiction and Interview: Lee Yew Leong
Poetry: M.L. Martin
Nonfiction: Willem Marx
Drama: Caridad Svich
Visual: Heather Green
Outsiders and Slovenian Literature Special Features: Lee Yew Leong
Illustrations and Cover: Matija Medved

Assistant Managing Editor (supervising Assistant Editors): Sam Bowden

Assistant Managing Editors (supervising Editors-at-Large): Kathryn Raver, Veronica Gisondi, and Sofija Popovska

Assistant Managing Editor (overseeing issue production): Ella Dailey

Chief Executive Assistant: Dina Famin
 
Senior Executive Assistants: Meenakshi Ajit, Michelle Clemente, and Julie Shi

Executive Assistant: Haeri Lee

Blog Editors: Xiao Yue Shan, Bella Creel, and Meghan Racklin

Art Director: Lee Yew Leong

Chief Copy Editor: Rachel Stanyon

Senior Copy Editors: Jennifer Busch, Ellen Sprague, and Maggie Wang

Copy Editors: Ruairi Casey, Megan Kruger, Hannah Lund, Caitlin McKie, Matilde Ribeiro, Grace Roodenrys, Mia Ruf, Max Schiewe, Sam Steinmetz, and Nahrin Youkhanna

Technical Manager: József Szabó

Director of Outreach: Georgina Fooks

English Social Media: Ruwa Alhayek, Arla Hoxha, Sebastian Kettner, Huey-En Ooi, and Grace Wilkins

French Social Media: Filip Noubel

Spanish Social Media: Sergio Serrano

Graphic Designer: Michael Laungjessadakun and Grace Wilkins

Digital Editors: Julia Maria, Savitri Asokan, and Haajar Abu Ismail

Marketing Manager: Kate Lofthouse

Director, Educational Arm: Sarah Nasar

Educational Arm Assistants: Mary Hillis, Marissa Lydon, Devi Sastry, and Sonakshi Srivastava

Business Developer: Arsalan Isa

Book Club Manager: Carol Khoury

Asymptote would like to acknowledge the support of Fondation Jan Michalski, Katja Urbanija, Petra Kavčič, and the Slovenian Book Agency.





For their generous donations this past quarter, our heartfelt thanks go too to Claudia Lund, Colleen Grogan, Christina Kramer, Debra Hass, Daniel Hahn, Guðrún Gísladóttir, Hamahang Translation, Jared Davis, Jeffrey Boyle, Katarzyna Bartoszynska, Laura Green, Lawrence Flood, Lynn O'Neal, Marjolijn de Jager, Mark Cohen, Martin Ingebrigtsen, Michelle Garnaut, Philip Feinsilver, Thomas Carroll, and Velina Manolova.

We'd also like to welcome Cristina Marinetti and Ilgın Yıldız, new sustaining members who joined us this past quarter.