Phantomb

Author: Isabella Baladine Howald

Translator: Elena Rivera

Publisher: Black Square Editions (2018)

“hantome ” (here translated as “phantomb”) is a word the author made up out of two words “hante” meaning “haunted and “fantome” meaning “phantom”. In French, “fantome” carries an additional meaning; it can mean a card that is left on a library shelf to show that a book has been borrowed (see the Larousse definition that Howald uses as an epigraph.) Wanting to give some of the flavor of these various meanings in English, I combined the word “phantom” and the word “tomb” to make the word “phantomb”.