GETMELIT · Issue 22 Saturday, October 3, 2026
Stories, poems, and reads that feed the literary mind.
01 — STORIES
Titi Kusumandari is an Indonesian writer now based in Belgium, with work scattered across Chestnut Review, PR&TA, Lost Balloon, and JMWW [https://lost-balloon.com/2025/07/09/wins-i-can-afford-titi-kusumandari/]. Her flash piece “Tango India,” out this season in SmokeLong Quarterly‘s Issue Ninety-Three, is why she’s this week’s pick — it does something most identity narratives don’t risk: it makes the NATO alphabet into a grief ritual [https://www.smokelong.com/tango-india/].
The piece unfolds in four interlocking sections built around a single fact: the narrator’s name was decided at a family roundtable before birth, recycled from a sister’s doll. From there, Kusumandari tracks how that name gets spelled out letter by letter to uncomprehending immigration clerks and call-center workers — Tango India becoming Kilo Uganda Sierra Uganda Mama Alfa — while contrasting it with Indonesian naming customs that favor time and weather over surnames. The story closes in an unexpected register: a mock FAQ that dares the reader to ask whether a name was ever the right question in the first place [https://www.smokelong.com/tango-india/].
Find more of Kusumandari’s short, sly work at Lost Balloon and Defenestration [https://www.defenestrationmag.net/2026/04/friendship-in-the-era-of-lice-ridden-dictators-by-titi-kusumandari/].
02 — BOOKS What to read before next week’s issue:
-
The Disappearers by Marlon James · Riverhead Books, 2026 [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/742603/the-disappearers-by-marlon-james/] — set among eight gay men rehearsing a play in 1988 Kingston, it’s “equal parts detective story and sociocultural history,” per Kirkus [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/marlon-james/the-disappearers/].
-
Every Story Is a Love Story by Imbolo Mbue · Random House, 2026 [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/804561/every-story-is-a-love-story-by-imbolo-mbue/] — a widower gets a letter from the woman who killed his wife, and Mbue uses it to ask what forgiveness actually costs, with “compelling characters” who keep “stumbling into uncharted territory,” says Kirkus [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/imbolo-mbue/every-story-is-a-love-story/].
-
Murmurs from the Hills: Rwandan Tales by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti · Archipelago Books, 2026 [https://archipelagobooks.org/book/murmurs-from-the-hills/] — pre-colonial Rwandan myth and personal memory braided together by a writer who has spent two decades finding new forms for the same unbearable history.
-
Pillaging the Dead by Degol Hailu · Cassava Republic Press, 2026 [https://cassavarepublic.biz/product/pillaging-the-dead/] — a debut about a student hawking banned books who gets swept into a surveillance state’s crosshairs, for anyone who still thinks satire is a soft target.
03 — OPPS For writers and authors:
The Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship [https://www.one-story.com/learn/fellowship/] — One Story — Deadline: October 13, 2026, 11:59pm ET — for early-career fiction writers (21+) with no MFA, whose work centers “inhabiting bodies of difference”; includes a $2,000 stipend, mentorship, and a manuscript review with One Story’s executive editor — Apply: https://one-story.subfolios.com/submit
Evaristo Prize for African Poetry [https://africanpoetrybf.brown.edu/contest-prizes/evaristo-prize-for-african-poetry/] — African Poetry Book Fund — Deadline: November 1, 2026 — for African poets (by birth, nationality, residency, or parentage) who haven’t published a full-length collection; $1,500 for a 10-poem manuscript — Apply: https://africanpoetrybookfund.submittable.com/submit
Punocracy Prize for Satire [https://punocracy.com/prize/] — Punocracy — Deadline: October 31, 2026, 11:59pm WAT — for Nigerian writers aged 15–30 working in satire, 500–2,000 words; ₦500,000 top prize — Apply: https://forms.gle/fvXVy6KUvUykCL2c8
Personal Narrative [https://electricliterature.submittable.com/submit] — Electric Literature — Deadline: October 11, 2026, 11:59pm PT (or first 500 submissions, whichever comes first) — for all writers, full essay drafts of 2,000–6,500 words; $100 on acceptance — Apply: https://electricliterature.submittable.com/submit
Flash & Micro Fiction, with an expedited BIPOC-writer track [https://fracturedlit.submittable.com/submit] — Fractured Lit — Rolling, no deadline — flash (401–1,000 words) pays $75, micro (under 400 words) pays $50; writers from underrepresented backgrounds can request a three-week turnaround — Apply: https://fracturedlit.submittable.com/submit
04 — SPOTLIGHT Scholastique Mukasonga
Scholastique Mukasonga didn’t publish her first book until she was fifty. Cockroaches, her 2006 debut memoir, came after she’d spent over a decade as a social worker in Normandy, having fled Rwanda for Burundi as a teenager and settled permanently in France in 1992 [https://scholastiquemukasonga.net/en/biography/]. The 1994 genocide killed thirty-seven members of her family, including her mother — and that loss, she has said, left her with “an urgent duty of remembrance to perform” [https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-scholastique-mukasonga/].
Two decades on, Mukasonga is one of the defining chroniclers of pre- and post-genocide Rwanda, and arguably its most formally restless. She has never settled into one mode: memoir, documentary, and fiction alternate across her books, each approaching the same unbearable history from a different angle. Her 2012 novel Our Lady of the Nile — set in an elite Catholic girls’ school in the years before the genocide — won the Renaudot and Ahmadou Kourouma prizes and was adapted into a film that won the Crystal Bear at the 2020 Berlinale [https://scholastiquemukasonga.net/en/biography/]. She has described her first two books as “paper graves” for relatives she couldn’t otherwise bury, and says the turn to fiction gave her “the distance necessary to widen my field of writing” [https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-scholastique-mukasonga/].
What makes her work distinct isn’t just its subject but its refusal of a single tone. Humor runs through even her darkest material — not as relief, but as, in her words, “the smartest way to convey a message” in painful material [https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-scholastique-mukasonga/]. The Paris Review has located her significance partly in how she makes Western readers sit with colonial complicity in a tragedy they’d rather file under distant and foreign, and partly in her insistence on recovering Rwandan oral tradition — the storytelling her colonial-era schooling dismissed as backward — as a living archive rather than folklore [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/10/03/the-dreams-and-specters-of-scholastique-mukasonga/].
Her new collection, Murmurs from the Hills: Rwandan Tales, translated by Mark Polizzotti and out November 10 from Archipelago Books, pushes further from memoir than almost anything she’s written — reaching back into pre-colonial Rwandan myth and folk memory rather than the genocide’s direct aftermath. Publicity copy describes it as a collection that layers “myth with memoir,” patchworking overlapping voices and inherited stories into something closer to oral history than conventional fiction [https://archipelagobooks.org/book/murmurs-from-the-hills/]. It’s a writer closing in on seventy still finding new rooms inside the same house of memory.
Read first: Our Lady of the Nile [https://archipelagobooks.org/book/our-lady-of-the-nile/] Coming next: Murmurs from the Hills: Rwandan Tales, November 10, 2026 [https://archipelagobooks.org/book/murmurs-from-the-hills/]
GetMeLit is a weekly dispatch from Moveee Magazine for readers who want the literary world before it’s old news. Full issue every Saturday; a single story or poem lands in your inbox Monday through Friday.
Comments
No comments yet — be the first to share your thoughts.