Cirrus@Austlit

'More than other genres, biography defies methodology. So how do we read it? asks Evelyn Juers in a bravura essay that opens HEAT Series 3 Number 11. Her resolution – to interpret, digress, to walk on some biographical byways – leads first to Virginia Woolf, and on to Albert Einstein and his significant connection to a scientific expedition at Wallal in Western Australia in 1922. In a striking work of fiction, Sara Mesa (translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore), takes us into the mind of a young translator, alone in an oppressive small town, as she attempts to make sense of her surroundings. And poets Mona Kareem (translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel) and Suneeta Peres da Costa complete the issue with minimalist sequences that traverse beauty, pain, displacement, totems and food.' (Publication summary)