Sertac Karan, a Turkish-Kurd and the protagonist of this absurdist black comedy, is a would-be writer who is alienated from society and much given to procrastination. From childhood, his exorbitant imagination shines at creating outlandish characters, which, when he is an adult, will become actual delusions, as his fantasies invade and undermine conventional reality. First…
Eka Kurniawan’s The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks follows the coming of age of Sato Reang, a mischievous boy growing up in a small Indonesian town, whose life moves between childhood pranks, religious pressure, friendship with the deeply pious Jamal, and the consequences of choosing rebellion over obedience. From the very beginning, Sato Reang announces his…
War, in No Man River, is an endless affair. Sprawling from the 1950s to the 1970s, the novel follows a close-knit cast of characters in a northern Vietnamese village from the end of the war for independence from the French colonial power to the war between north and south Vietnam. As fathers, brothers, sons headed to…
The Osaka-based Hasegawas used to be a model family—happily married, two sons, a daughter, and a dog. But when the elder son Hajime dies at the age of twenty, their lives start falling apart. Each reacts to loss differently: Kaoru, the younger son and the narrator of the story, leaves to study in Tokyo but…
In 2023, University of Minnesota Press released a translation of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The two novellas (published as one volume with a thorough explanatory afterword by translator Jeffrey Angles) add the often-forgotten backstory to one of the world’s most iconic monster movies, often credited solely to the imaginations of director Ishiro Honda and…
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War,…
The Korean word “han” is difficult to translate precisely into English, but the concept revolves around a profound sadness, regret, resentment and a loss of a collective identity that arises from historical injustice, such as occupation, war, and separation. It is, in other words, a generational trauma with Korean characteristics. Lisa Lee’s debut novel American…
Jackson Alone is a singularly unique novel that subverts expectations with a cast of characters who are each vividly imagined, performing confusing and surreal acts in a Twilight Zone ethereality. Written by Jose Ando—a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and translated by Kalau Almony—known for his translations of unique and intense stories—Jackson Alone is a…
Karan Mahajan’s ambitious third novel, The Complex spans roughly fifteen years of Indian family life, from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It charts the Chopra clan of Modern Colony, North Delhi, through the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the rise of the BJP and the Mandal Commission agitation against caste-based affirmative action….
Few institutions in India have shaped the imagination of the nation as profoundly as the railways. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong places this vast network of tracks, workshops, stations and employees at the centre of a sweeping narrative that follows one woman’s life alongside the evolving story of modern India. Moving from the decades after Independence to the…
More than technology or trade, even more than defense, all societies need food, and agriculture is thus a vital hinge of power. Such is the focus of Nahoko Uehashi’s three-volume fantasy novel Kokun: The Girl from the West, the first volume of which has recently appeared in an English translation by Cathy Hirano.
1869 was a time of Russian expansion into Central Asia and British anxiety about India’s northern borders. Because Tibet was closed to Europeans during this “Great Game”, the British trained Indians in surveying and sent them across the mountains as covert mapmakers.
Agri Ismaïl’s Hyper is an unusual migrant family saga of an unlucky, Kurdish family’s epic displacement across countries; refugees who struggle and fail to achieve a sense of being at home anywhere they live. An inventive novel of ideas, it is a hard, pitiless satire on migrants’ love of Western values (whether Marxism or Capitalism),…
The Omani literary scene is currently flourishing, led by authors such as Jokha Alharthi, whose Celestial Bodies won the International Booker in 2019: she provides a foreword to this collection by Hamoud Saud, another prominent Omani writer. He writes in Arabic, and he has already been translated into Azerbaijani, Japanese, and Spanish. In his translator’s…
Palestinian poet, novelist and commentator Bassem Khandaqji wrote his latest novel, A Mask the Color of the Sky while in an Israeli prison. Any prisoner, anywhere, who manages to write a novel while incarcerated must be commended for persistence, dedication and focus; this one won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His novel is…