Ecstasy - issue 1

Astra Magazine Issue One - Ecstasy, edited by Nadja Spiegelman / ISBN 9781662619007 / 192-page paperback with flaps, no advertisements / new copy but discounted because of light wear from shipping

***

To the ancient Greeks, ecstasy—ekstasis—meant standing outside yourself. You stand outside yourself and a god enters you, or a new language. You slip powder into a water bottle and music enters you. This is what reading offers: the chance to forget the hands that hold the page, to inhabit the hand that held the pen. Contributors such as Terrance Hayes, Mieko Kawakami, Fernanda Melchor, Kim Hyesoon, Sayaka Murata, Ottessa Moshfegh, Solmaz Sharif, Dorthe Nors—and many more—enter into a conversation that rejects borders. Here you will encounter writers who have lived in many different countries, who speak through all of them, speak for none of them, who don’t speak your language, yet speak directly to you.

Astra Magazine is a brand new international literary magazine, an emerging must-read for anyone interested in the best new literature from around the world. Astra Magazine will connect readers and writers from around the world - New York to Mexico City, Lagos to Berlin, Copenhagen to Singapore and beyond. We want to bring about a new, borderless, and vital mode of reading, with a focus on literature in translation and original writing in English. We’re interested in the inter: the overlaps, the in-between, the authors who defy easy categorization. We are on the cusp of a new era, more isolated and more interconnected than ever before. Astra is a magazine of this new moment, bringing us together while, the world over, we create a new language for ourselves.