Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs

Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs PDF Author: Helen Mitsios
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780887277924
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan charts the enormous social and cultural changes that have taken place in Japan in the last twenty years. This collection of short stories features the most up-to-date and exciting writing from the most popular and finest award-winning authors in Japan today.

Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs

Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs PDF Author: Helen Mitsios
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780887277924
Category : Japan
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan charts the enormous social and cultural changes that have taken place in Japan in the last twenty years. This collection of short stories features the most up-to-date and exciting writing from the most popular and finest award-winning authors in Japan today.

Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue PDF Author: Helen Mitsios
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452955891
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book Here

Book Description
This extraordinary collection, the first anthology of Icelandic short fiction published in English translation, features work by twenty of Iceland’s most popular and celebrated living authors—including Andri Snær Magnason, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Kristín Ómarsdóttir, and Auður Jónsdóttir—granddaughter of Halldór Laxness, who won the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature. Celebrated in Europe and Scandinavia but less known in the English-speaking world, these writers traverse realms of darkness and light that will be familiar to readers who have fallen under the spell of Scandinavian fiction. While uniquely Icelandic in topography and tenor, with a touch of the island’s supernatural charm, the stories traffic in the enduring and universal complexities of human nature. Here is a fictional universe where the ghosts of Vikings and spirits tread, volcanoes grumble underfoot, and writers trip the Northern Lights fantastic across the landscape of the Icelandic imagination. At long last, readers can enjoy award-winning stories now expertly rendered into English by the country’s most renowned translators. In “Killer Whale” a father contemplates euthanasia for a terminally ill child, in “Self Portrait” a vacationing family in Spain crosses paths with migrants, in “Escape for Men” a woman searches for an ex-lover in the South of France, and in “The Most Precious Secret” the nature of artists and the art world is mercilessly revealed. Both the Viking myths of Iceland’s forefathers and the cutting-edge modern world of the country today are brilliantly alive in these remarkable and original stories. This collection is an excursion to an island where almost two million travelers descend yearly on a population of 345 thousand natives. Iceland is the place Björk calls home, the location where Game of Thrones was filmed—a place with open lava fields, glaciers, and iceberg lagoons among other natural wonders that is becoming one of the “hottest” tourist destinations on earth. Out of the Blue transports readers to Iceland’s timeless and magical island of Vikings and geographical wonders, and it promises to be a seminal collection that will define Icelandic literature in translation for decades to come. Contributors: Auður Ava Olafsdóttir, Kristín Eiríksdóttir, Þórarinn Eldjárn, Gyrðir Elíasson, Einar Örn Gunnarsson, Ólafur Gunnarsson, Einar Már Guðmundsson, Auður Jónsdóttir, Gerður Kristný, Andri Snær Magnason, Óskar Magnússon, Bragi Ólafsson, Kristín Ómarsdóttir, Óskar Árni Óskarsson, Magnús Sigurðsson, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson, Guðmundur Andri Thorsson, Þórunn Erlu-Valdimarsdóttir, Rúnar Helgi Vignisson.

We, the Children of Cats

We, the Children of Cats PDF Author: Tomoyuki Hoshino
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1604867566
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
A man and woman find their genders and sexualities brought radically into question when their bodies sprout new parts, seemingly out of thin air…. A man travels from Japan to Latin America in search of revolutionary purpose and finds much more than he bargains for…. A journalist investigates a poisoning at an elementary school and gets lost in an underworld of buried crimes, secret societies, and haunted forests…. Two young killers, exiled from Japan, find a new beginning as resistance fighters in Peru…. These are but a few of the stories told in We, the Children of Cats, a new collection of provocative early works by Tomoyuki Hoshino, winner of the 2011 Kenzaburo Oe Award in Literature and author of the powerhouse novel Lonely Hearts Killer (PM Press, 2009). Drawing on sources as diverse as Borges, Nabokov, Garcia-Marquez, Kenji Nakagami and traditional Japanese folklore, Hoshino creates a challenging, slyly subversive literary world all his own. By turns teasing and terrifying, laconic and luminous, the stories in this anthology demonstrate Hoshino’s view of literature as “an art that wavers, like a heat shimmer, between joy at the prospect of becoming something else and despair at knowing that such a transformation is ultimately impossible…a novel’s words trace the pattern of scars left by the struggle between these two feelings.” Blending an uncompromising ethical vision with exuberant, freewheeling imagery and bracing formal experimentation, the five short stories and three novellas included in We, the Children of Cats show the full range and force of Hoshino’s imagination; the anthology also includes an afterword by translator and editor Brian Bergstrom and a new preface by Hoshino himself.

Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction

Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction PDF Author: Alex Bates
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 160329595X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Get Book Here

Book Description
As Japan moved from the devastation of 1945 to the economic security that survived even the boom and bust of the 1980s and 1990s, its literature came to embrace new subjects and styles and to reflect on the nation's changing relationship to other Asian countries and to the West. This volume will help instructors introduce students to novels, short stories, and manga that confront postwar Japanese experiences, including the suffering caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the echoes of Japan's colonialism and imperialism, new ways of thinking about Japanese identity and about minorities such as the zainichi Koreans, changes in family structures, and environmental disasters. Essays provide context for understanding the particularity of postwar Japanese literature, its place in world literature, and its connections to the Japanese past.

Keep Moving and No Questions

Keep Moving and No Questions PDF Author: James Kelman
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629639826
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
James Kelman's inimitable voice brings the stories of lost men to light in these twenty-one tales of down on their luck antiheroes who wander, drink, hatch plans, ponder existence, and survive in an unwelcoming and often comic world. Keep Moving and No Questions is a collection of the finest examples of Kelman's facility with dialog, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and sharp cultural observation. Class is always central in these brief glimpses of men abiding the hands they've been dealt. An ideal introduction to Kelman's work and a wonderful edition for fans and Kelman completists, this lovely volume will make clear why James Kelman is known as the greatest living modernist writer. Five of the stories collected here are brand new, and the rest have been significantly revised by the author for this definitive edition.

RUIN

RUIN PDF Author: Cara Hoffman
Publisher: PM Press
ISBN: 1629639303
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Get Book Here

Book Description
A little girl who disguises herself as an old man, an addict who collects dollhouse furniture, a crime reporter confronted by a talking dog, a painter trying to prove the non-existence of god, and lovers in a penal colony who communicate through technical drawings—these are just a few of the characters who live among the ruins. RUIN is both bracingly timely and eerily timeless in its examination of an American state in free-fall, unsparing in its disregard for broken institutions, while shining with compassion for all who are left in their wake. Cara Hoffman’s short fictions are brutal, surreal, hilarious, and transgressive, celebrating the sharp beauty of outsiders and the infinitely creative ways humans muster psychic resistance under oppressive conditions. The ultimate effect of these ten interconnected stories is one of invigoration and a sense of possibilities—hope for a new world extracted from the rubble of the old.

Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film

Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film PDF Author: Barbara E. Thornbury
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303034276X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film explores ways that late 20th- and early 21st- century fiction and film from Japan literally and figuratively map Tokyo. The four dozen novels, stories, and films discussed here describe, define, and reflect on Tokyo urban space. They are part of the flow of Japanese-language texts being translated (or, in the case of film, subtitled) into English. Circulation in professionally translated and subtitled English-language versions helps ensure accessibility to the primarily anglophone readers of this study—and helps validate inclusion in lists of world literature and film. Tokyo’s well-established culture of mapping signifies much more than a profound attachment to place or an affinity for maps as artifacts. It is, importantly, a counter-response to feelings of insecurity and disconnection—insofar as the mapping process helps impart a sense of predictability, stability, and placeness in the real and imagined city.

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories PDF Author: Jay Rubin
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014139563X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Get Book Here

Book Description
This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable works being written today. Short story writers already well-known to English-language readers are all included here - Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata - but also many surprising new finds. From Yuko Tsushima's 'Flames' to Yuten Sawanishi's 'Filling Up with Sugar', from Shin'ichi Hoshi's 'Shoulder-Top Secretary' to Banana Yoshimoto's 'Bee Honey', The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty and comedy. Curated by Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated several of the stories, and introduced by Haruki Murakami, this book will be a revelation to its readers.

Food issues 食事

Food issues 食事 PDF Author: Miriam Castorina
Publisher: Firenze University Press
ISBN: 8855185055
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Get Book Here

Book Description
Food issues 食事. Interdisciplinary Studies on Food in Modern and Contemporary East Asiaconcentrates on the relationship among food, culture, literature, and language in a comparative, transcultural, or literary perspective. The contributions investigate these aspects from different approaches: historical, sociological, anthropological, religious, linguistic, and want to deepen issues such as the symbolic value of food; food as an essential element for the construction of individual identity and a sign of belonging to a community; food as an intercultural medium; food as language and the language of food. The articles included in the volume are organized in a Japanese and a Chinese section and use different approaches within humanities disciplines to explore topics ranging from classical and contemporary East Asian literature to present-day issues, focusing on Food Culture and its declinations.

Parallel Stories

Parallel Stories PDF Author: Péter Nádas
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446484157
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1156

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1989, the memorable year when the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his early morning run finds a corpse lying on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This classic police-procedural scene opens an extraordinary novel, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans - Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies - across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary richly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet Peter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny, reverberating parallels that link them across time and space. Three unusual men are at the heart of Parallel Stories: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to dark secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s, Ágost Lippay-Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political régimes for decades, and Andras Rott, who has his own dark record of dark activities abroad. They are friends in Budapest when we eventually meet them in the spring of 1961, a pivotal time in the postwar epoch and in their clandestine careers. But the richly detailed, dramatic memories and actions of these men, like those of their friends, lovers and family members, range from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, across Hungary. The ever-daring, ever-original episodes of Parallel Lives explore the most intimate, most difficult human experiences in a prose glowing with uncommon clarity and also with mysterious uncertainty - as is characteristic of Nadas's subtle, spirited art. The web of extended dramas in Parallel Stories reaches not just forward to the transformative year of 1989 but back to the spring of 1939, with Europe trembling on the edge of war; to the bestial times of 1944-45, when Budapest was besieged, the final solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end; and to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. But there is much more to Parallel Stories than that: it is a daring, demanding, and very moving exploration of humanity at its most constrained and its most free.