Novel
Author: Dimitris Lyacos || Forthcoming February 23, 2027
Translated from the Greek by Andrew Barrett
Dimitris Lyacos’ website || Interview in Michigan Quarterly Review || Interview in The Common
Until the Victim Becomes Our Own is a meditation on violence, memory, and the structures that bind communities through control and exclusion.
A chorus of the dispossessed—prisoners, survivors, exiles, witnesses without names—speaks from deserts, ruins, factories, and cells. Their voices braid into a single, restless montage that follows violence as it changes shape across the ages: from sacrifice to law, from law to labor, from labor to the cell and the slaughterhouse, and at last into the cold grammar of cybernetic control. Even the divine is carried along this current—a god who once drank blood withdraws into private enclosures, then thins into a presence with no face at all, circulating endlessly through the grid.
Through it all moves a little girl, surfacing again and again as witness and counterpoint. She interrupts the logic of the system, bearing memory and loss, holding open the fragile possibility of saving the past—and of another beginning.
The closing section, A Notebook for the Victims, loops back into the narrative, opening a second passage through fragments of myth, science, and history—the hard ground beneath the story. The redactor’s hand turns out to be the final avatar of the power that ran from sacrifice to code, and the machine metabolises its own materials into itself, in a circle of erasure and creation.
Dimitris Lyacos‘ Until The Victim Becomes Our Own and his internationally acclaimed trilogy Poena Damni rank among the most innovative achievements in contemporary European writing. Defying genre distinctions and hailed as “total literature,” his work has appeared in translation in more than twenty languages and inspired projects across the arts, including contemporary music, theatre, dance, visual art installations, and photography.
Moving across prose, poetry, drama, and theory, Lyacos examines violence and ritual, exclusion and scapegoating, the changing forms of the divine, and the transformation of coercion from sacrificial and juridical structures into the cybernetic systems of the present. Corriere della Sera has described him as “the only living Greek in contention for the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
Excerpts from Until The Victim Becomes Our Own have appeared in publications such as The Columbia Review, Chicago Review, Image, MAYDAY, and River Styx. His interviews have been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, BOMB, The Common, and Gulf Coast, among others.
Andrew Barrett is a translator and classicist based in Detroit. He translates from Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, and Latin and holds an MA in Literary Translation Studies from the University of Rochester. His work has appeared in Words Without Borders, BOMB, Chicago Review, Image, and other publications. A former resident at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, he was one of forty-two translators who contributed to the new English translation of Nonnus’s Dionysiaca, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2022.
Please follow us on social media (@indirectbooks) and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on these projects and help support fearless writing.
Indirect Books 