Boys’ love manga (BL manga), like other romance manga, is an all-encompassing genre. You will find anything from fantasy to your standard slice of life stories. As the name suggests, the stories in Boys’ Love manga are always about a romantic relationship between two boys (or men). These manga often also often have a larger …
Sci-fi novels lend themselves particularly well to the audiobook format. The atmosphere that can be created so elegantly by a single voice in your head really enhances the sci-fi tropes of isolation, artificial intelligence, and discovery. This also means that sci-fi audiobooks are something of a double-edged sword. Unless they’re performed perfectly by the right …
Discover some of the most fascinating literature from Butan with these twelve books. We hear a lot about the works of fiction and nonfiction from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka or India, but hardly anything from the peaceful nation, Bhutan. In fact, news from Bhutan rarely features in many newspapers. As a result, people know …
Much like how Netflix ushered in a new Golden Age of TV, a similar age has hit the world of shonen manga and anime. Every decade or so, we’ve had a wave of instant classic shonen manga, but the past few years has seen a real revelation. From future classics like Demon Slayer and Hell’s …
Written and drawn by Ichigo Takano, the Orange manga is a thought-provoking and heartwarming story told through the eyes of its main protagonist, Naho, a second year high school student. We also follow the story of Naho’s 27-year-old future self (seen mostly through letters from the future). But while Orange is told through her eyes, …
Romance is a curious genre, given that so many books, films, TV shows, even video games often feature romances but aren’t necessarily of the romance genre. When it comes to romance manga, however, the romance really is the point. Romance manga also stretches so many different genres, the terms of which can be a little …
When the Horimiya anime burst onto Funimation in Winter 2021, it turned a lot of heads, and many of us became instant fans. The Horimiya manga, however, has been a huge success for quite some time, racking up insane sales numbers. The question — for both new fans of the anime and manga readers who …
Taylor Bradley from publisher Honford Star shares insight into their process of choosing local cover designers for their East Asian books and why they wouldn’t consider doing it any other way. For the first book that we published at Honford Star, we made a small but hugely influential decision – we’d hire a Korean artist …
Year after year, we are treated to more incredible Japanese books in translation. After the fantastic turn-out of Japanese books in 2020 — especially Mieko Kawakami’s breakaway hit Breasts and Eggs — 2021 has a lot to live up to. Luckily, all signs point to 2021 being an even better year for new Japanese books …
I’ve written and spoken before about how exciting Chinese literature in the 21st Century is. If you aren’t paying attention to the wealth of imaginative, surreal, political, and evocative Chinese novels in translation right now, you really should be. Chinese literature, however, has a very particular legacy. So much so, in fact, that this legacy …