From the editors
 
It seems this thing we call space is constantly escaping our perception, as sand flowing out of our palms, as lost breaths, falling leaves that melt into the earth, we never can hold it. Or we are constantly escaping it, space, a ceaseless attempt to escape it, as from a familiar house, from a narrowing sky, as if each day we find more reasons to disappear – to recall a Cioran depression. However, is it possible for a presence to ever truly disappear? For even if we could disappear, having once existed, do not the traces of our erasure still remain? Space, therefore, is always there, invisible and visible, abstract and concrete, remained and vanished, finite and infinite, outside and inside, ect. and never does it fit on this point or that point of any binary.
 
Thinking of space in truth might be thinking with space. In some way, it’s the effort to not deny its very being, even as a subaltern being, and more, it’s the effort to signify it, expand it, multiply it, recreate it, and then, we have one more shelter for our abnormal desires, one space to embrace, to love all kinds of beings in the universe. The awareness of each being’s fragility and vulnerability in facing and ceaselessly negotiating the particular space in which it dwells, is also the awareness of the necessity to share with, connect to, learn from/with each other, and always, it happens in a space, with a space, and opens a new space together.
 
Writing and along with it, translating the writing, essentially becomes a way of (de)constructing and transforming each being’s space, whether it’s a presence or a memory restored, real or illusory, here, there, somewhere, nowhere, and infinite and borderless.
 
In the space of the book, in these beings, in these fruitful languages, there are individuals drifting, alone together. To nowhere. To their readers.
                                                                                                               
from Autumn, Hanoi, 2014

AJAR

In this issue:
Avianti Armand, Eliza Vitri Handayani, Đoàn Tuấn Đức, Đặng Thơ Thơ, Đức Anh, P.K., Lê Minh Phong, Phạm Vũ Văn Khoa, Nguyễn Thuý Hằng, Kaitlin Rees, Nhã Thuyên, Michael Brennan, Lưu Diệu Vân, Yang Xie, Ouyang Yu, Elizabeth Allen, Iris Tiên, Nur Soliman, Toby Fitch, Tú Trinh, Phan Quỳnh Trâm, Mai Văn Phấn, Lê Đình Nhất Lang, Tyler Junker, Shuntarö Tanikawa, Tịnh Thuỷ, Leith Morton, Rolando Tinio, Jose Lacaba, Robert Nery, Mai Nguyễn, Bùi Chát, Lý Đợi, Bỉm, Trần Wũ Khang, Phan Bá Thọ, Jack James Huỳnh, Trần Nghi Hoàng, Frederic Turner.
 
Deep thanks to all. The present and the absent. Thanks to you, the readers who open your hearts to us.

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