In Couch Grass's four remarkable stories, the acclaimed Ethiopian author Adam Reta uses multiple voices that interweave throughout the narratives, offering the reader a richer perspective through a narration method he terms hitsenawinet. Footnotes reveal surprising elements, nursery rhymes develop into storylines, and silences convey as much meaning as spoken words.

A boy waits by a wall, whistling for the girl who has captured his heart. A writer believes his beard holds the secret to his art. A nursery rhyme echoes through a woman’s name, reshaping her fate. Chilli paste becomes both delight and ruin, tracing the fault lines of desire, history, and revolution.

In ‘Auntie Lomi Shita’, a dissatisfied housewife shares her wish to attend church more often with her husband. In response, he hires a maid to accompany her to church regularly. One Sunday, a man in disguise approaches her at church and confesses his love. This prompts her to use the maid as a courier to organise secret meetings with him, eventually leading her to leave her husband for her lover. In reaction to her betrayal, the seemingly powerless husband devises an elaborate plan for revenge.

Rendered into English for the first time by Bethlehem Attfield, Couch Grass invites readers into Ethiopia’s literary heartbeat, where everyday gestures carry philosophical weight and history lingers in intimate lives. Bold, experimental, and deeply humane, this collection introduces Reta as a pioneer who ushers Amharic literature onto the global stage.

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Bethlehem Attfield holds a PhD in Modern Languages from the University of Birmingham. Her research concentrates on translating African-language literature. In October 2025, her translation of Adam Reta’s short story collection, Etemete Lomi Shita, was published under the title Couch Grass by Fidessa Publishing. Her translation of an Amharic novel by Yismake Worku, titled The Lost Spell, was published by Henningham Family Press in March 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2022 TA First Translation Prize by the Society of Authors. Additionally, she is the translator and producer of the audio musical story ‘Requiem for Potatoes’. In 2023, she received the Global Africa Translation Fellowship Award for her project, which aimed to create a more inclusive African literary canon, moving beyond the hierarchies that presently marginalise literature in indigenous languages.

Adam Reta is the author of eight anthologies and four novels written in Amharic. Born in 1958 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he earned his first degree from Addis Ababa University, majoring in Geography. He completed his Master's degree in the Netherlands and currently resides in Ottawa, Canada. Two of his novels won the HoHe prize for the best novel of the year (hoheawards.org) (የስንብት ቀለማት 2017 and አፍ 2019). His English story ‘Of Buns and Howls’ was published in ‘Addis Ababa Noir’, an anthology edited by Maaza Mengiste and published by Akashik Press in 2020. His short story የድንች መዋስት was translated by Bethlehem Attfield and published as a Kindle book in 2020. The translator also produced the story as an audio musical with original music, making it available on Findaway Voices, which is currently accessible on Spotify and 25 other audiobook platforms. Reta is highly esteemed among Ethiopian readers and critics for the depth of his writing, as well as for creating and introducing new literary techniques to Ethiopian literature. Various Ethiopian literary scholars have conducted research based on his work.

Jean Fanchette’s poems often treat the subject of exile from a distant homeland and dwelling in a metropole that confers outsider status. Filled with murmurs, dimly lit landscapes, and seaside expanses, his verse grasps at receding memories through sensory detail.

Hassan Melehy has succeeded in a translation that is as poetic as it is worldly: Jean Fanchette’s poetry is reinvented in English by Melehy to bring the reader its exilic, oceanic, archipelagiac consciousness while at the same time highlighting its dedication to, and play with, form that are deeply aware of the history of French poetics. —Anjali Prabhu, Edward Said Chair in Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles

Fanchette celebrates a “life embraced / As a perspective of escapes and returns.” These lines suggest that exile, that indelible watchword in Fanchette’s work, has more than a negative valence; errancy is “embraced” and welcomed. He remains “Open to the wind that comes from elsewhere.” So is his translator Hassan Melehy, who demonstrates exquisite sensitivity to the vocabulary of Fanchette’s Mauritian landscapes. —Alexander Dickow, author of The Distance, and You In It

Originally from New England, Hassan Melehy lived all over the USA before settling in North Carolina in 2004, where he lives with his wife, Dorothea Heitsch. His first poetry collection, A Modest Apocalypse, was published by Eyewear in 2017. In addition to his creative writing he has written three books of criticism, most recently Kerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory (Bloomsbury, 2016). He has translated works of criticism, philosophy, and social science from French, including Jacques Rancière’s The Names of History (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Born on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, Jean Fanchette (1932–92) was a psychiatrist, writer, and editor who spent his adult life in Paris. While still in medical school he won several French national poetry prizes. In 1959, with the support of Anaïs Nin, he founded the French-English bilingual review Two Cities, which featured the work of many future notables, including Michel Deguy, Lawrence Durrell, and Octavio Paz. Under the Two Cities imprint, Fanchette published Minutes to Go (1959), the first “cut-up” experiments of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Sinclair Beiles, and Gregory Corso. In his region of origin Fanchette is highly celebrated: every two years since 1992, the Jean Fanchette Prize has been awarded to a writer from the islands of Mauritius, Rodrigues, Réunion, Madagascar, the Comoros, and Seychelles.

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