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 …
Literature
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 …
In the heart of the city there are so many lights. The streets are lit up and the people can see themselves and one another with clarity; there’s nowhere to hide. Close by there is the sea: endless, dark, unknowable. Between the two, in a nameless place, live a father and son. They have no …
At the age of 25, after the events of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, Jung Chang moved to London. There, she wrote a biography which told an epic story of herself, her mother, and her grandmother. Three women of 20th century revolutionary China. That book, Wild Swans, was a global sensation and a book …
So many of our greatest stories of terror and the supernatural come from faraway lands. A nation’s laws, customs, traditions, politics, and religion will have a profound effect on what kinds of stories they want to tell. Horror is a magnificent genre that takes heavy themes, chews them up, and spits them out as something …
Translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott How do we define narrative? Traditional narratives as we typically think of them involve an entirely fictional story laid out with familiar beats: chapters, dialogue, and paragraphing; a beginning, middle, and end; exposition, themes, and motifs. But experimental forms of narrative, the kinds that have existed for centuries …
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released when I was seven years old. It took the world by storm, turning children into bookworms and bestowing the magic of reading onto an entire generation. Not me, though. I didn’t understand books. At age seven I’d just gotten my PlayStation. I had no friends. I was …
In 2016 this small Norwich-based indie press by the name of Strangers Press published a selection of chapbooks representing a range of unique Japanese voices in translation known as Keshiki (roughly meaning ‘landscape’). Three years later, they have returned with a new series: Yeoyu. Eight Korean short stories by eight Korean authors, translated by six …