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 …
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 …
Best known as one of Studio Ghibli’s most beloved movies, directed by Hayao Miyazaki back in 2003, Kiki’s Delivery Service, much like Howl’s Moving Castle, began its life as a children’s novel. But while the novel of Howl’s Moving Castle was written by a beloved Welsh author, Kiki began her life in Japan, created and …
Picture yourself in a cabin, alone at the edge of the world, with Norwegian fjords on one side and endless snowy wastes on the other; only the seabirds and thoughts of the family you abandoned for company. Or did you abandon them? Well, you have a lot of time to mull that over. Didn’t you …
Holiday Heart is a novel that unravels the time and space of a relationship, pulling it apart and making a battlefield of the pieces. It is a novel about the far future of a marriage, nineteen years deep and in tatters. It’s a novel that explores the hows and whys of getting to this place …
Arid Dreams, the much-anticipated collection by Duanwad Pinwana, is, remarkably, (outside of academia), her first time being published in English internationally. That is, along with her novel Bright – released at the same time as this collection. After reading these stories, I’m so grateful to Mui Poopoksakul for translating so elegantly and beautifully, and for …
Hekla’s father named her after a volcano. Four years after she was born, the volcano after which she was named erupted, and her volcano-obsessed father took Hekla in his Jeep to see the eruption. The sight forever stoked a burning fire in her, turning Hekla into a young woman who wanted nothing in the world …
Award-winning Korean author Hye-young Pyun, a writer who excels at creating and controlling her tragic heroes like a puppet master does a marionette, is my favourite Korean author in translation. Her works The Hole and City of Ash and Red are masterpieces of genre fiction which both carved out new niches within the psychological horror …
Body swap stories are a dime a dozen, from Freaky Friday to Your Name. But how about a story of three girls who discover the power to turn into boys for a short time? Girls Lost is the tale of three teenagers, exhausted and confused by the system that divides boys and girls and the …
There is so much mischief, corruption, deception, and aggression spilling out from Hurricane Season that the book’s bindings can hardly contain it. Hurricane Season is a courageous story, and Fernanda Melchor is undoubtedly a courageous author for committing it to paper. It’s a book about the myriad evils that stain the human spirit. It’s a …
