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…
It is a tribute to the literary diversity of India that this anthology of ten excerpted classics includes eight or nine different languages. They also represent four different religious traditions. Yet the texts are unmistakably Indian, sharing a love for words, sounds and images and exhibiting an exuberance rarely found in other cultural traditions.
Originally written in Bengali, Shabnam presents a passionate love story set in 1920s Afghanistan. What is love? asks author Syed Mujtaba Ali: a dream or a dreamy reality? Maybe, it is like an overnight train journey through a long tunnel, in which the traveler stays awake to catch a glimpse of the sun’s first rays,…
Beginning in 2018, a Japanese person might log on to YouTube only to find a video featuring a thin figure clothed entirely in black. A white papier-mache mask—blank, with holes for eyes and mouth and a peak for the suggestion of the nose—provides the only contrast. The figure speaks in an artificially processed, saccharine voice…
That Kazushige Abe’s Mysterious Setting is difficult to read has nothing to do with the prose, which in Michael Emmerich’s translation is pacey and accessible, but is instead due to the novel’s relentlessly grim narrative. In a story replete with bullying, gaslighting and exploitation, the foreshadowing that often accompanies the end of a section becomes…
Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese science fiction writer of the 1970s and early 1980s with two collections of short stories currently available in English—Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears. Both are the collaborative work of several translators, and both were widely lauded for their innovation and biting social commentary. When I reviewed Terminal Boredom…
A 2024 round-up of reviews of 75 works in translation from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai through Bengali, Sanskrit and Urdu to Sumerian, Arabic and French: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, children’s books and classics.
Debut author Kim Jiyun majored in creative writing at university, later studied television screenwriting, and found inspiration for her first novel in an unlikely place: a neighborhood laundromat. It’s paid off. Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat has become a bestseller in Korea and now it’s been translated into English by Shanna Tan, a prolific translator based in…
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…
Originally published in 2011 and now translated from Urdu by Riyaz Latif, On The Other Side bears the distinct trademarks of Rahman Abbas’s writing: poetic language, an emphasis on the gullies of Bombay, the dangerous divisiveness of religion in contemporary India, and the iron grip of patriarchal terror.
A much-loved memoir about a Japanese author’s relationship with her cat is translated into English for the first time by award-winning translator, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Writer Mayumi Inaba won many prizes for her stories and poems before her untimely death from cancer in 2014. She was well-known as a cat lover, particularly her calico, Mii….
In the corner of a busy cafe in Tokyo, three men meet over coffee. But the trio of Goto, Takumi, and Sasaki are not who they seem—they are rehearsing carefully scripted roles in a property scam. With real estate values soaring in the city, schemes to make a quick profit are on the rise.
Novels set around the Jewish Bene Israel community in India are as rare as hen’s teeth, but Sheela Rohekar’s 2013 Hindi novel, Miss Samuel: A Jewish-Indian Saga, translated this year into English by Madhu Singh, must be one-of-a-kind. Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as…
Set in the early to mid-19th century in British-occupied India, Sayam Bandyopadhyay’s Carnival, at the outset, focuses on a middle-aged recluse living in Calcutta. Despite becoming a landowner at his father’s death, Rajaram Deb prefers a monotonous life confined to the walls of his bedroom—often at the cost of his responsibilities—barring rare moments of socializing….
Titles from the venerable Penguin Classics imprint are usually books one knows one should have read even if one hasn’t (yet): known unknowns, as the famous saying goes. Behind the Painting by Thai author Siburapha is, even for the well-read anglophone consumer of literature, likely to qualify as an unknown unknown. First published 1937, this…