Jean-Marc Agrati and Jacques Barbéri in The AI

The latest issue of The Arkansas International is here, and it’s completely devoted to science fiction! I’ve got two short stories by writers Jean-Marc Agrati and Jacques Barbéri in it. I’m thrilled to share space with my friends Jamie Richards, translating comics from Manuele Fior, and Sarah Vap, with poems from Mass Extinction,

In the mid-‘80s, Jacques Barbéri (1954—) burst onto the French science fiction scene and even academic studies stateside, but was not translated until 2010, first by Michael Shreve and then by Brian Evenson. Cosmology, entomology, and poetry fascinate this experimental musician, Italian translator, and former dentist, the author of over a hundred stories and fifteen novels. The story in this issue is taken from Barbéri’s first collection: 1985’s Kosmokrim.

Jean-Marc Agrati (1964—) worked as an aeronautical engineer and a math teacher before devoting himself entirely to writing in the early 2000s. A prodigious outpouring of over a hundred stories, mostly very short, has followed, making him a fixture of the French small press scene. A fondness for fantastical and surreal conceits has led him to juggle with genres. “Le filtre à air” was first published in 2019, in the bilingual speculative fiction revueAngle Mort.