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Explore In translation

Paris Desert, Tokyo Mirage

Hitomi Kanehara

‘What I thought was the world yesterday, today I couldn’t even touch its outline.’

Two essays by Hitomi Kanehara.

The Fruit of My Woman

Han Kang

‘It was late May when I first saw the bruises on my wife’s body.’

Imperium

Ryszard Kapuściński

Ryszard Kapuściński, once the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, on the concept of borders.

Shame

Mieko Kawakami

‘During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes.’

The Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever

Mieko Kawakami

‘It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.’

God Bless You, 2011

Hiromi Kawakami

‘If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?’ Hiromi Kawakami on the nature gods of Japan.

A Language of Figs

Sema Kaygusuz

Sema Kaygusuz on the inheritances of genocide and historical memory, and what her own grandmother, a survivor of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey, taught her about life and language.

Car Concentrate

Etgar Keret

‘Women mostly touch it tentatively with the backs of their hands.’

The Great Homecoming

Anna Kim

Read an excerpt from The Great Homecoming by Anna Kim, a novel of love and loss in the wake of the Korean war.

A Time for Everything

Karl Ove Knausgaard

‘It can almost seem as if God was genuinely concerned about mankind.’ Translated by James Anderson.

Karl Ove Knausgaard | The Proust Questionnaire

Karl Ove Knausgaard

'What is your most unappealing habit? Maybe all the brain-like chewing gums I leave behind everywhere I work.'

Brother in Ice

Alicia Kopf

‘My brother is a man trapped in ice. He looks at us through it; he is there and he is not there.’

From the Left Bank of the Flu

Misumi Kubo

‘The big road looked to me like a river, the cars rushing by as if carried along on its current.’

Alphonse

Marie-Hélène Lafon

‘He was long and white; his hands especially were long and white, and he sewed; he looked after the linen; he worked as a woman would; he lived in the house; he didn’t speak, he was rarely spoken to.’

Translated from the French by Stephanie Smee.