My belated but profound thanks to @literaryhub.bsky.social for running this excerpt from Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl. 🩵🌊
@graywolfpress.bsky.social
12.03.2026 15:32
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My belated but profound thanks to @literaryhub.bsky.social for running this excerpt from Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl. 🩵🌊
@graywolfpress.bsky.social
A screenshot from The Continent. Text reads: TC BOOK REVIEW BY JACQUELINE NYATHI Seeing ourselves in inconvenient mirrors Cameroonian filmmaker Osvalde Lewat forces us to face ourselves in her intense novel. OSVALDE LEWAT'S debut novel The Aquatics (translated by Maren Baudet-Lackner) reads at first like the usual tired satire about African countries. A place called Zambuena; the Old Man, whose influence is felt everywhere; a bloated Official Party with bloated officials; a culture of terror and repression. But then the focus sharpens on the stifling life of Katmé, wife of an ambitious, rising political star who's the prefect of Akriba. Katmé is managing a staff of servants, eating with fine silverware, and determinedly ignoring her own demon: the death of her mother 20 years ago. Everything changes when a foreign company is contracted to build a road that plans to pass over her mother's grave. Her canny husband seizes on this as an opportunity to advance his career. The collateral damage of the manoeuvrings falls on Katmé's gay best friend and protégé, Samy. Naturally, homosexuality is illegal in Zambuena - what will people say when they find out the prefect's wife supports a person like that? The Aquatics morphs quickly from satire to horror. What happens to Samyis unspeakable - and, as Lewat makes clear, everyone is responsible. It overshadows Katmé's own painful journey back to herself, away from the bubble in which she enclosed herself -- one that will be familiar to many middle-class Africans -- in the face of nightmarish inequality. There's little redemption - except for Katmé's feminist (re)awakening, which is heartening. In contrast, the brutality, a reality for gay people across so much of Africa, is sobering. It's hard to ignore how similar Katmé is to most of us: living obliviously, caring only about our own comfort. If the Aquatics of the novel are monsters, then perhaps so are we all.
My latest for @thecontinent.org: on Osvalde Lewat's The Aquatics, tr. by Maren Baudet-Lackner.
THE AQUATICS, a novel by Cameroonian filmmaker Osvalde Lewat, translated from the French by Maren Baudet-Lackner, is lush, courageous, and disturbing. Some brief thoughts from me on Goodreads and Substack. @coffeehousepress.bsky.social
substack.com/@mandysuzann...
Still thinking about this book, and was so happy to review it, @mandysuzannewong.bsky.social! #books #Booksky #naturewriting #invertebrate
Thank you so much for spending time with it. As a longtime fan of your work, I'm beyond honored.
Thank you so much for this amazing opportunity, @pw.org!
“Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl displays radical thinking at its critical heights.”
Thank you so much for this shoutout, @bocaslitfest.bsky.social! @graywolfpress.bsky.social
trinidadexpress.com/features/loc...
Geetanjali Shree’s characters and dancing prose are always a delight! Some thoughts from me in ASYMPTOTE on THE ROOF BENEATH THEIR FEET, translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni. @andotherstories.bsky.social
www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2026/02...
Next week!
Urszula Honek’s collection of dark stories, WHITE NIGHTS, translated from the Polish by Kate Webster & longlisted for the Intl Booker Prize, are quietly piercing – & now available to US readers from @twolinespress.com. Here’s my review in ASYMPTOTE.
asymptotejournal.com/blog/2026/02...
Stopped by the fabulous @typewronger.bsky.social in Edinburgh for the first time today, met the amazing Tee, adopted a wee origami dragon, & bought zines by Heidi Clark plus a book about Raffaella della Olga, who uses typewriters to create brilliant abstract images. @yalebooks.bsky.social
It was a pleasure to spend time with AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF COTTON – a magnificent documentary novel by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated polyphonically from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney – and to write about it for ASYMPTOTE. @graywolfpress.bsky.social
www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2026/02...
I’m delighted as ever to have 3 reviews up in Asymptote’s "What’s New In Translation" column for Feb 2026.
asymptotejournal.com/blog/new-in-...
Thank you so much @diversishelf.bsky.social for featuring Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl in issue 85!
diversishelf.beehiiv.com/p/diversishe...
Thank you @pw.org for including me in Literary MagNet! It was a lot of fun to talk about some of the great literary magazines I’ve had the honor to work with.
www.pw.org/content/lite...
@graywolfpress.bsky.social @diggingpress.com @new-sinews.bsky.social @talkvomit.bsky.social
As the slow poke diver who happily hovers over marine invertebrates while others look for sharks or whatever I can't wait to get a copy of this
![“Mesmerizing. . . . Relentlessly empathetic, these essays reframe nonhuman beings as individuals worthy of respect. Readers will be moved.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“A passionate paean to life’s wonders.”
—KIRKUS
“[Mandy-Suzanne Wong] has made sea snails totally present on the page, magically uncurling their opaque inner worlds, making them resonant subjects of marvel and love. . . . Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl is up there with some of my favorite animal writing of the past decade.”—Ania Szremski, 4COLUMNS
“Wong’s investigations undulate, beckoning an embrace of the unknowable, and with it a call to better coexistence.”—ORION](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2dvcxog5z5vkps6l2rekxmh3/bafkreifehxq6m4cvojmevp444wbwoi3n2sznfu62hsoprrjacn3nwubpte)
“Mesmerizing. . . . Relentlessly empathetic, these essays reframe nonhuman beings as individuals worthy of respect. Readers will be moved.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “A passionate paean to life’s wonders.” —KIRKUS “[Mandy-Suzanne Wong] has made sea snails totally present on the page, magically uncurling their opaque inner worlds, making them resonant subjects of marvel and love. . . . Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl is up there with some of my favorite animal writing of the past decade.”—Ania Szremski, 4COLUMNS “Wong’s investigations undulate, beckoning an embrace of the unknowable, and with it a call to better coexistence.”—ORION
The cover of Mandy-Suzanne Wong's "Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl" shows a photographic collage of sea life, with an ocean-blue rectangle in the center with the title and author's name.
Happy pub. day to @mandysuzannewong.bsky.social's DAUGHTER OF MOTHER-OF-PEARL, seventeen ingenious essays devoted to snails’ and aquatic invertebrates’ uncanny ways of living 🐌🐙🪼🐚 Pick up a copy from your local indie bookstore today!
www.graywolfpress.org/books/daught...
It’s publication day for Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl!! Huge thanks to Yuka Igarashi for helping it make sense. Thank you, Kathryn, for lending your incredible multitalents to the illustrations. Thank you, Graywolf, for being THE BEST PUBLISHER EVER!!
🐌🦑🐙🐚🪸🌊
www.graywolfpress.org/books/daught...
DOMOP is almost here. 🐌 17 Feb 2026 @graywolfpress.bsky.social 🌊
www.graywolfpress.org/books/daught...
🐌🦑🐙🐚🪸🌊
I’ll have the honor of discussing, at NYU SCRIBE’s Lecture Series, 6 Mar, 4 pm EST on Zoom: Bermuda, books (including Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl & The Box), publishing, elasticizing English, & rethinking “heritage.” @graywolfpress.bsky.social
Free registration: engage.nyu.edu/event/12206840
Ania Szremski at 4Columns calls Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl "fiercely imaginative and poem-like, though technically nonfiction (speculative nonfiction, perhaps?), essays...[that make] sea snails totally present on the page."
🙏
@graywolfpress.bsky.social
4columns.org/szremski-ani...
“How might we thread the needle between devising open-ended questions to learn more and filling in the blanks with images generated by a poetical human brain?”
Huge thanks to Barbara J. King for this review of Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl!
@graywolfpress.bsky.social
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
I’m a guest in the room. “You’re too light”
When you cry, coffee has no right to speak
hats turn blue.
-- "They Leave to Reach Likeness" by Ka Yee Lee
Translated from Chinese by Tim Tim Cheng
Brilliant poem in @wwborders.bsky.social
wordswithoutborders.org/read/article...
"It's February. Weeping, take ink."
Boris Pasternak,
tr John Stallsworthy & Peter France
Many thanks to the editors at @necessaryfiction.com for the opportunity to review FALSE WAR by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, polyphonically translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer @graywolfpress.bsky.social
necessaryfiction.com/reviews/fals...
FALSE WAR by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, tr Natasha Wimmer (@graywolfpress.bsky.social). Reviewed by @mandysuzannewong.bsky.social. necessaryfiction.com/reviews/fals...
As blissfully solitary as writing can be, collaborative writing can also be a total blast, given the right word-dance partner and venue. I’m privileged to have found both. Thank you @cincinnatireview.bsky.social for featuring our work!
www.cincinnatireview.com/micros/helen...
"I don’t believe the authors mean a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation or multiple personalities elbowing one another out of the driver’s seat... I rather think they are envisioning one animal, one starfish, simultaneously living many lives." — @mandysuzannewong.bsky.social longreads.com/2026/02/05/m...
“Radically reimagining the ideal of 'the self' through coexistence with other species...to cherish the many other life forms while knowing we will never fully understand them.”
What an honor for Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl! Thank you @electricliterature.com! @graywolfpress.bsky.social
A thousand thanks to the editors of @longreads.com ads for publishing "The Endless Self," an excerpt from Daughter of Mother-of-Pearl, which comes out on 17 Feb from @graywolfpress.bsky.social ess.
longreads.com/2026/02/05/m...