Like so many of our reading choices, having access to more diverse short stories (instead of just the stuffy old white men we were forced to read as kids) can really opened your eyes to all the magic that the short story medium can offer. If you already love short story collections, or if you …
Literature
Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett & David Boyd Mieko Kawakami is already a superstar author in her native Japan. A philosophical and feminist powerhouse of beautiful prose, interwoven with discussions on death, birth, womanhood, growth, and change. She is now a rising star in the English language, too, thanks to translations of works …
Xiaolu Guo needs no introduction. Born in a Zhejiang fishing village, studied in Beijing, moved to London in 2002. Guo has directed several movies and documentaries since moving to the UK, and is perhaps best known for her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and her memoir Once Upon a Time in the East, …
Hiromi Kawakami has made a name for herself as a writer with a defined sense of time and place, and how these forces change us. In Strange Weather in Tokyo, her lovers represent two periods of Japan’s history and how they must court one another in the present. In The Ten Loves of Nishino, ten …
In the afterword of The Beast Warrior, Nahoko Uehashi writes that the book’s prequel, The Beast Player, “was like a beautiful closed circle”, that it didn’t require a sequel. After reading both books, one immediately after the other, it’s impossible to agree with that statement. The Beast Warrior not only feels like a true successor …
Not long ago, my friend Taylor (of the publishing house Honford Star) offered an opinion about literature: that books longer than 300 pages rarely justify their own length. This got me thinking about the fantasy genre, and whether or not so many beloved fantasy epics need to be as long as they typically are. While …
Book subscription boxes are big right now, and they’re big for a reason. Until recently, it was something of a chore for bookworms to do much besides visiting bookshops or joining book clubs. Book subscription boxes have expanded our options in terms of community and how we enjoy literature. My Chronicle Book Box is a …
Soji Shimada is a legend of genre fiction in Japan, standing at the top of an impressive mountain of great whodunnit writers. But here, the author of Murder in the Crooked House and The Tokyo Zodiac Murders has turned his ambitions to science fiction, while still maintaining that knack for suspense, tension, and mystery. One …
Translated from the Spanish by Fionn Petch How do you begin to discuss the narrative, historical, and cultural impact of music on the human experience? Do you explore the sounds of nature? Provide anecdotes about the gold record aboard the Voyager? Tell the wild story of an enormous organ that took fifteen years to build, …
Some of the best-loved works of literature in the 20th century came from a post-independence India. Works by Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are synonymous with great modern literature, but there are many more Indian novels in English for you to discover. And here are just a few of the best. Indian Literature in English: …