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In a first for Almost Island, we have a libretto from an opera. Anna Deeny Morales reinterprets and rewrites the The Massacre of the Innocents from the Fleury Playbook to reflect a contemporary violence.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra searches for the Mughal poet Rahim and finds a layered and ambiguous persona, far larger and more human than the one encountered in our textbooks.

Chandu Maheriya's essay The Master's Bungalow, instead of inhabiting the house decides to investigate its foundations. First published in Dalit Adhikar in Gujarati, the essay is a visceral look at the infrastructure of bodily waste, its accumulation and disposal, and how it organises a whole system of oppression around it. In Hemang Ashwinkumar's careful and annotative translation, the essay reveals the perilous intimacy between life and what it wastes to continue as life.

Laszlo Krasnahorkai reads at the 2013 Almost Island Dialogues from his masterly and disturbing work, Animalinside.

Through three Mapuche women poets of Chile we enter a singular world both physical and linguistic. A visceral, feral courage is spoken in the work of Yeny Diaz Wenten. Journeys of continuous loss form the poems of Daniela Catrileo. Maribel Mora Curriao’s poems have their “foundations soaked in blood”, and mourn a land locked in tragedy. Rodrigo Rojas brings them to us in his keen, tender translations.

In poems with their feet firmly planted in Cordoba, Safaa Fathy writes about a space where everything has two names--one for itself and one for the ocean that demands legibility. To become a listener in this space is to open oneself to the devious sound of history, a sound that wishes to smoothen or repair that which desires brokenness.