Izumi lost her husband and her job. Now she spends her time doing craft projects like sewing handmade stuffed animals. She has come to realize that she spent 20 years acting the role of “successful woman”
One More Story About Climbing a Hill: Stories from Assam is the latest book by renowned Assamese writer Devabrata Das. This collection of eighteen short stories, translated from the Assamese original, offers a unique and varied portrait of contemporary Assam. Remarkably, despite being translated by several individuals, including the author himself, the prose maintains a…
Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
From 1976 to 1989, Hai Fan was part of the guerrilla forces of the Malayan Communist Party. These short stories are inspired by his experiences during his thirteen years in the rainforest.
The Malayalam edition of the Mini Krishnan-helmed collections of newly translated classic short stories offers readers a glimpse into the changing social landscape of Kerala. Covering stories written and published across forty decades, the writers of The Second Marriage of Kunju Namboodiri and Other Classic Malayalam Stories navigate the various promises of the early 20th…
Once upon a time, “storytellers” (who predate writers by a great margin) were respected members of the communities they served: entertainers, yes, but also playing a crucial role in preserving memories and lore by retelling old stories and creating new ones. If the blood of this tradition doesn’t actually run in Subi Taba’s veins, she…
Banu Mushtaq has been peering into the homes of Muslim women in Southern India her entire life, and she doesn’t like what she sees. Husbands return from work angry, women are beaten, and children fight over food. These scenes populate Mushtaq’s short story collection, Heart Lamp. The stories have been selected from Mushtaq’s vast oeuvre…
In one story in Shusaku Endo’s Portraits of a Mother, the narrator lies in a hospital bed after a serious operation with the vague impression that his mother is holding his hand. He wakes to the realization that this was a dream and that the “gray shadow” of his mother is nothing more than a…
With no real uniting theme, Unusual Fragments is more of a miscellany than a collection. The authors were born over a span of 78 years. Three of the stories are by women who grew up during the Pacific War—Taeko Kono (1926-2015), Takako Takahashi (1932-2013), and Tomoko Yoshida (1934-). Another is by a woman, Nobuko Takagi…
A pregnant woman meets a long-lost acquaintance only to have him mysteriously slip through the streets, never to be seen again; a shop owner buys an expensive mannequin yet grows haunted by its look of painted anguish; and a group of teenage boys grow infatuated with a girl-next-door before reality rudely pierces their bubble.
One of the publisher’s most recent of its national anthologies, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories provides portrayals of the country in the years 1905 to 1945, when the nation was under imperial Japanese rule, as well as glimpses of life in the Republic of Korea (ROK, aka South Korea), which came into existence…
For fans of Korean film, the uncompromising film director Lee Chang-dong needs little introductions. With a brief but powerful filmography of six films made between 1997 and 2018, he has braved controversial topics to critical acclaim. Burning, his 2018 comeback film after an eight-year hiatus, was shortlisted for an Oscar and won numerous other awards….
Seen through the lens of a career, Yukio Mishima is a difficult author to classify. In the introduction to this new collection of the author’s stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, Mishima biographer John Nathan notes that, by his death at the age of forty-five, Mishima had written dozens of novels, forty plays and 170…
The modern classics of Southeast Asian literature, with the singular exception of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, largely remain a blank spot on the English-language literary map. Thank goodness, then, that Penguin Southeast Asia has in recent years published translations from, for example, Vietnamese and Tagalog; Pauline Fan’s recent translation of a collection of Malay short fiction…
Migration, especially in literature, is normally seen as having “the West” as its destination. Migration within Asia, from the less affluent to richer places, appears far less often. Singapore, for example, has had a long history as a trading port drawing in merchants and laborers from East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Singapore’s colonial…