Grass is a starkly beautiful graphic novel which reveals the true-life story of a Korean ‘comfort woman’ during the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. The occupation ended after the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Grass is a timely and gravely …
Women in Translation
History. A Mess. is a wonderful novel. Its ambition is met with resounding success every step of the way. Everything that it sets out to achieve – every theme explored, every emotion captured – it does so with pomp and flourish. And the translation by Lytton Smith is nothing short of astounding, capturing the oppressive …
Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder The state of the world as it stands today, with regressive government bodies, the existence of oligarchies, state-controlled media, and a frightening amount more, all makes it both easier and harder to create new dystopian fiction. Easier in the sense that you can throw a dart at a …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Janet Hong is a writer and translator based in Vancouver, Canada. She received the 2018 TA First Translation Prize for her translation of Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was also a finalist for both the 2018 PEN Translation Prize and the 2018 National Translation Award. She has translated Ha Seong-nan’s Flowers of Mold, Ancco’s Bad Friends, and Keum Suk …
Translated from the French by Faith Evans Just imagine being so fervently admired by someone as larger-than-life as Simone de Beauvoir and yet so under-appreciated on the grand global scale, while your contemporaries – Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf – go on being as beloved after death as they were in life. Well, no more. …