Author: Shushan Avagyan Translator: Deanna Cachoian-Schanz Publisher: Tilted Axis Press Paperback One of our books of the year 2024 So says: This book came out on the cusp of 2023 and 2024 or else it would have been on mine – and, frankly, everyone’s – 2023 Book of the Year lists. It’s an immediately-absorbing conversation heard in scintillating fragments between two Armenian women writers in the present about two women Armenian writers in the past, who wrote on either side of the genocide. It’s about archives and erasures, both colonial and patriarchal, and it’s about translation (Avagyan is a translator herself, and Cachoian-Schanz’s endnotes set a new standard in contextual information and reflection, bringing the reader into the conversation). It’s about longing, letters, friendship, fragments, and the deeply-felt proposition that what we write and dream is ongoing through others in ways we cannot imagine, but this book allows us to hope.
