by James Lawless Unable to find emotional rapport with his wife, Lil, with whom he shares a childless marriage, middle-aged and ailing librarian Leo Lambkin begins a correspondence with an old flame, Bernarda, who writes to him after she hears of the tragic death of his mother. Bernarda, whom Leo disguises as Jude, informs him that he is the father…
— Memoirs of an illegal daughter by Shen Yang, translated by Nicky Harman 'I broke a law simply by being born.' In the late 1980s, Shen Yang was born during the fiercest years of China’s One-Child Policy. As the second daughter of the family, she was a massive liability – an excess child, a product of illegal birth. From being…
Translation from Russian, Polish and Japanese, Notes and Commentary by Roger Pulvers. THE YEAR 2020 was the year the world turned inward. We may have stayed at home, but this was a time to look deeply inside ourselves to find connections that we carry in us with all people all around the world. ACCLAIMED AUTHOR and translator Roger Pulvers recorded…
by Chuden Kabimo Translated from the Nepali by Ajit Baral Shortlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature 2022 On a day of earthquake and rain, a young man gets bad news. Ripden, his childhood friend, has been swept away by a landslide. He makes his way back to Malbung, the village of his birth, and the memories come rushing back:…
with other stories and poems by Miyazawa Kenji and works by Mori Ogai, Ishikawa Takuboku, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Dazai Osamu, and Inoue Hisashi. Translation from Japanese and Commentary by Roger Pulvers. MIYAZAWA KENJI remains not only Japan’s most popular and beloved writer of stories for children and adults but a prescient voice for this century on how we can survive and…
by Roger Pulvers Roger Pulvers has been writing fiction set in Japan for over fifty years. Now, for the first time, a collection of his very best short stories has been brought together in a single volume. Some of these stories, like the one that gives the collection its title, The Charter tells the story of a man who has…
Tanka by Takuboku Ishikawa Translated from the Japanese, Notes and Commentary by Roger Pulvers. Roger Pulvers' translations - with detailed notes and commentary - of Japan's greatest tanka poet, Takuboku Ishikawa, is now available here for the first time in this volume. Each tanka - a poem that in Japanese has thirty-one syllables - is a microcosm of the human…
Short Stories by Liang Wern Fook, Translated from the Chinese by Christina Ng Confucius sits in his chair. A mute uncle utters his first word in decades. A talking potato is sworn to confidentiality. These are stories written with Liang Wern Fook’s left hand. All authors write with this hand, coaxing out left-handed stories from a right-handed reality. Liang has…
— An Asian American Coming of Age Memoir by Karin K. Jensen Water is fluid, soft, yielding. But water will wear away rock...what is soft is strong. — Lao Tzu In 1920s Detroit, King Ying stands on a box to iron clothes in her parent’s laundry business and endures taunts of Ching-Ching Chinaman on the playground. She dreams of a…
by Horace Ho Daniel Fang’s mid-thirties are marked by the birth of his daughter and the death of a childhood friend. His daughter’s birth and infancy reminds him of his own boyhood, his friend’s death of the good times he had with back in their old neighbourhood. They were the kids from the wrong side of the temple, kids…
50 Bangladeshi Women Poets in English Translated by Nabina Das and curated by Alam Khorshed "So often South Asian poetry feels to me like a body with severed limbs, all inaccessible to each other. This anthology is both healing of that and a recognition; with the very force of its thought and its omnivorous cosmopolitanism, it will defy every…
by Yeng Pway Ngon In the 1910s, thirteen-year-old Leong Ping Hung comes to Singapore from China to seek his fortune. Decades later, he is a lonely old man mourning his shattered dreams. His granddaughter Yu Sau struggles to take care of him while trying to make sense of her own life in a rapidly changing country. He speaks Cantonese, and…
