If there’s one nation with ludicrous potential to shake the world of literature, it’s China. And that world-shaking is slowly coming to pass, with Chinese sci-fi being heralded as the start of a new science fiction golden age and authors like Yan Lianke deserving of the Nobel Prize. With all this being said, any time …
Willow Heath
It’s hard to say what’s most important in the world today, especially in terms of knowledge. Proving to anti-vaxxers that vaccines do, in fact, save lives, or proving to the US government that global warming is a real and present threat to life. But something that needs to be done now in order to promote …
Jeanne collects and mentally catalogues the images of men’s penises. She gives no rhyme or reason for her habit. Or is it a hobby? A job? An obsession? Even that much is unclear. It is merely a collection. For 160 pages of The Collection we the readers follow Jeanne’s routine, all of which is centred …
Fate can mean a variety of things to many different people; depending on your culture, religion, background, your attitude to life or your level of romanticism. Fate, or destiny, has been somewhat simplified and beautified by media and fiction through the Disney filter of the twentieth century. But here, in The Yogini, it is used …
If there’s one thing we take for granted, it’s ourselves. We might be thankful for our jobs, our friends and loved ones, our money, even our lucky stars. But, even if we’re not as tall, thin, or beautiful as we’d like to be, we usually feel secure in the idea of taking our ‘selves’ for …
Where the hell do you start? Both in writing a fiction about depression (and the hold it takes on both the depressed and those around them), and in talking about that fiction? I’ve rewritten this intro six times, trying to find the best way to dive into a discussion about Starling Days. But the easiest …
Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews In around one hundred pages, this whip-crack of a novel has the eerie feel of a biblical parable, but one with depths that can be plunged to your heart’s content. With The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada has crafted a story of heroes and villains, with a …
Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft The more you travel – the more time you spend away from the place in which you grew up – the quicker you come to realise that it’s not the places we visit and the things we see that change us. It’s the people we meet who do …
What do we picture when we’re asked to think about refugees? Most of us, I’d wager, see exactly what the author of one of the stories in this book, The Dancer’s Tale, pictures: “Harrowing images of women and babies on sinking boats … a tattered, angry mass at the Jungle in Calais; children behind barbed …
My Past is a Foreign Country, while being at once an affecting and intimate story of growth, change, and self-discovery, also does with utmost success what any good memoir should: it educates. Through this book, Zeba Talkhani reveals herself to be an impassioned and clear teacher of the multidimensionality of Islam across multiple nations and …