Endless Blue Sky by Lee Hyoseok | Translated by Steven D. Capener The wealth of information we’ve lost over the years – through war, suppression, occupation, and simple accident – is staggering. Coupled with this loss is our largest barrier against the freedom of information: language. So much of what we can learn about a culture hinges on its availability in our own...
Kyung-sook Shin | Translated by Anton Hur Kyung-sook Shin is a giant in the world of Korean literature, and rightly so. In fact, her own translator for this novel, the wonderful Anton Hur, mentioned in an interview (for Matthew Sciarappa’s YouTube channel) that her novel The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness is a ‘perfect microcosm of Korean society’. This kind of praise has...
August is Women in Translation Month, and given how much we humans enjoy lists, especially ones containing multiples of five, we were very excited to create our ultimate list of who we believe to be some of the ultimate women of today’s Asian literary world (at least those that have so far been translated into English). For a long time women’s voices in...
The Summer is very much upon us and it is hotter than I ever imagined it could be in Korea at the moment. As the summer turns to Autumn, here’s our next list of the best upcoming fiction by Asian and Asian-American authors. If you know of any novels I’ve missed, feel free to contact me on Twitter @booksandbao or via email. The Court Dancer | Kyung Sook...
Welcome to our Giveaway! Time for some book love and our first giveaway. One lucky reader will win the five books below. These are some of our favourite books and we’re so happy to share them. To enter just sign up to our mailing list below. We don’t send more than one email a month so no spam (we promise). Share this post and tag us @booksandbao on any...
Convenience Store Woman Written by Sayaka Murata | Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori When I was living in Inagi-shi, a once-upon-a-time small city now swallowed up by the swell of suburban Tokyo, I would enter the convenience store next to my apartment every morning and buy a sugar-soaked bun to walk to the station with. The clerk who served me each and every...
Written by Loa Ho | Translated by Darryl Sterk Living in twenty-first century Korea, the animosity levied against Japan by much of the population still holds true today, even amongst many young people. This animosity of course stems from Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Such hostility is arguably understandable, but one article that appeared last year...
Written by Yoko Ogawa | Translated by Stephen Snyder As a twenty-something who has, not for a moment, put learning and discovery behind him, I have spent several years now glued quite earnestly to YouTube as a means of studying things that escaped me as a child. Much like the housekeeper of The Housekeeper and the Professor, one of those things I missed out on was...
Written by Yoko Tawada | Translated by Margaret Mitsutani It can take decades for us to begin to see where dystopian novelists were coming from when they wrote their stories. When their ideas start to pop up in real life, we feel a shaken sense of awe at their powers of foresight, overshadowed by the dread that they were right. They were never meant to be right...
Written by Eka Kurniawan Translated by Labodalih Sembiring “The tigress had come to him, lying beside him on the surau’s warm rug, while the universe outside froze. As his grandfather had said, the tigress was white as a swan or a cloud or cotton wool. How unbelievably happy he was, for the tigress was more than anything he had ever wanted”. Indonesia’s...
