‘If I had known she were heading for Tokyo then, and if I had known she thought of Tokyo as a city of zombies, I would have wanted to know, of course, whether she saw me that way, too.’
Toshiki Okada’s ‘Breakfast’ seems as though it ought to provide plenty of material for a discussion of the challenges with which it confronts a translator. Here is one candidate: its punctuation. The punctuation is decidedly non-English. How does one translate a comma from Japanese into Englis…
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Alison Smith on the week she spent with Ursula K. Le Guin.
This surreal tale from Haruki Murakami circles a Charlie Parker album that never existed. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
A monastic community persists after a ‘great chaos and collapse’ in this story by the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, Olga Tokarczuk. Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft
Two poems from Rebecca Tamás’ collection WITCH.
Summer Brennan on high heels, foot-binding, and our ongoing performances of gender.
‘My wife and I lay side by side, the bear looming over us in the same way a crucifixion scene looms above the pews inside a Catholic church.’
Short fiction by Naomi Ishiguro.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley on why The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is the best book of 2015.
Nicole Flattery on why Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater is the best book of 1962.
‘Shells, like the kind on the sand of the beach, that’s all they are. That’s all any of us are. All these colored shells, each one trying to be picked up before the rest.’ New fiction by Lisa Taddeo.
‘I wonder why I am always the last to let go. I wonder if there is any amount that will ever be enough.’
