In Argentine tradition and literature, the gaucho – ranchers and horsemen – were, and still are, romanticised in much the same that the cowboys are in modern US folklore and stories. This was most flagrantly epitomised by José Hernández in his great Argentine epic poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro, which told the tale of a …

Rather than digging into the necessary and fascinating history surrounding Every Fire You Tend right off the bat, it’s perhaps more important to lead with this: Every Fire You Tend is an astonishing work of art. An experimental piece of storytelling that blends fact and fiction, history and folklore, religious parables and superstitions, to create …

Strange Weather in Tokyo, first published in English in 2014, was a frightfully clever introduction to the mind of Kawakami. It was a love story between a young Tokyo office worker and her former teacher from another lifetime which placed its own plot and characters front and centre while subtly framing them in a theme …

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 …

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 but are recently and rightfully in vogue …

Since reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, I’ve been a big fan of the graphic memoir. Using drawing as a medium to deliver a message isn’t a new concept but I’m so grateful for the slew of comics in the last couple of years that deal with the more difficult concepts in life. From the simply …

Here is, perhaps, a new kind of frightening. We’re living in a new golden age of horror films right now, and, if Hye-young Pyun’s books are any indication, a parallel golden age of horror writing as well. The modern master of American horror, Stephen King, famously delineated three kinds of ‘scary’: Gross-out: something bloody or …

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 …

Ellen’s father was a man psychologically damaged. And though the details of that damage are never made clear, it had a grave impact on his family – on Ellen, her actress mother, and her older brother. That is, until his sudden death which occurs in his sleep in a hospital bed. Ellen blames herself for …

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 …