Two Lines 22

This issue of Two Lines reminds me, once again, of how large the world of writing is. That both Clifford Landers’s translation of Amilcar Bettega’s “Vicious Circle,” an intricately plotted narrative that ultimately bends time itself, and Jeremy Tiang’s translation of Zou Jingzhi’s short, biting vignettes about the mundane horror of living in China during the Cultural Revolution, are incredibly successful versions of the single genre we call “the short story” proves to me, as every issue of Two Lines does, both the delight to be had in the commonalities of reading across cultures and languages, but also that the experiences available to us in even one small subset of literature are wide open. —CJ EVANS