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The Singularity

by Balsam Karam

Narrator Mara Wilson

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Translator Saskia Vogel

Length 3 hours 24 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator
About the translator

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter’s name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman—on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses—of a language, a country, an identity—when once, her family fled a distant war. Balsam Karam weaves between both narratives in this formally ambitious novel and offers a fresh approach to language and aesthetic as she decenters a white European gaze. Her English-language debut, The Singularity is a powerful exploration of loss, history, and memory—an experience akin to “drinking directly from a flood of tears” (Aftonbladet).

Fiction

Balsam Karam (b. 1983) is of Kurdish ancestry and has lived in Sweden since she was a young child. She is an author, librarian, and university lecturer, and made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize. The Singularity was shortlisted for the August Prize and is her second novel, published in Sweden in 2021.

Mara Wilson is a professional writer, playwright, actor, narrator, and storyteller best known for her roles in Mrs. Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street, and Matilda. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she regularly appears at live storytelling and comedy shows, including her own, What Are You Afraid Of?. A voice actor on the podcast Welcome to Night Vale, she maintains a blog, MaraWilsonWritesStuff.com, and her writing can be found on sites such as Jezebel, The Toast, and McSweeney’s.

Saskia Vogel is the author of Permission and the translator of over twenty Swedish-language books. She was awarded the Berlin Senate Endowment for Non-German Literature and was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. She worked on The Singularity as part of her translation residency at Princeton University. From Los Angeles, she now lives in Berlin.