Rather than digging into the necessary and fascinating history surrounding Every Fire You Tend right off the bat, it’s perhaps more important to lead with this: Every Fire You Tend is an astonishing work of art. An experimental piece of storytelling that blends fact and fiction, history and folklore, religious parables and superstitions, to create …
Willow Heath
It’s difficult to know where to start with talking about trans rights, gender dysphoria, and the politics behind transgender stories, other than to simply say that trans people need all the help and support that they can get. That’s where transgender books and trans authors come in. Understanding your own dysphoria and deciding on the …
On an unassuming street in central London, a five-minute walk from Victoria Station, a hotel sits quietly. This hotel, Georgian House, is nestled amongst other hotels with similar facades. Whitewash outer walls, thick columns, large wooden doors, tall windows, short stoops leading to the front door where a knocker may or may not hang. There …
Strange Weather in Tokyo, first published in English in 2014, was a frightfully clever introduction to the mind of Kawakami. Parade is a continuation of that. Strange Weather was a love story between a young Tokyo office worker and her former teacher from another lifetime which placed its own plot and characters front and centre …
Translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson I had never read any of Hrabal’s poetry or prose before this book, which makes All My Cats an interesting place to start, being a non-fiction confession of sorts. All My Cats is a sliver of a book that recounts, with great pain and suffocating guilt, an ageing …
Izumi Nakamura is a sushi chef from the southern Japanese island of Amakusa, where the nori (seaweed) used in sushi is farmed and collected along its beaches. Here in London she runs the Sozai Cooking School, which offers an incredible sushi making class which, in just two hours, provides you with all the most vital …
Bangkok and tattoo art have a long history that spans centuries. In fact, the Sak Yant tradition of tattooing which began in the Khmer Empire (now Cambodia) has remained an important tradition in Thailand to this day. A Sak Yant tattoo, depicting geometric shapes and sacred animal designs, is a piece of spiritual art intrinsically …
Franz Kafka never knew fame or even real recognition in his lifetime, but his legacy has grown through the decades since his death. It seems that more and more books published this century have been inspired by his themes, his dark comedic tone, his philosophies, and even his bleak characters and settings. This is certainly …
Hamid Ismailov’s accomplishments, both intellectually and professionally, are astonishing. As a polyglot with works published in multiple languages — and translated into even more — he is an accomplished poet, writer, and translator. But Ismailov is also a writer in exile, having been forced to flee his home of Uzbekistan after the fall of the …
Language is highly politicised, it can be used as a weapon, used against us — as we’ve seen time and again in our current political climate. The simple use of a certain language or dialect can also be a dangerous, rebellious, or illegal act the world over. Both today and throughout history, people have died …