Lost in Translation: A Journey on the Li River

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My China-born daughter is thirteen the summer day we take a cruise down the Lijiang River from Guilin to Yangshao. This stretch is said to be the inspiration for much Chinese poetry and art: “Guilin’s unique topography. and beautiful scenery of the Karst Mountains and the unsurpassed beauty of the

Laughs in Translation

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Recently, I was reading The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s antic retelling of the stories of Faust and Pontius Pilot. The novel follows—in part—the devil and his deranged retinue, including a bipedal cat and a naked woman, as they wreak havoc on Moscow. The edition I own, translated by

Tokyo Ueno Station’s Anti-Stereotypical Portrayal of Homelessness

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Yu Miri directly tackles homelessness in Japan in her 2014 novel, focusing on the memories and reflections of the ghost of a homeless migrant manual laborer, Kazu, as he wanders through the titular park, which had been his home.

Svetlana Alexievich’s Verbatim Theater

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In her exploration of the Chernobyl disaster, Svetlana Alexievich dramatizes history—as she insists, we can only understand events of this magnitude by recasting them on a human scale.

Delusion and Reality in Earthlings

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Sayaka Murata’s latest novel to be translated into English explores the way individuals try to move through a world that, ultimately, doesn’t make sense.

The Morning Star and Endings

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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new work compels readers to pay attention to the dissolution of animal life and our reliance on it, to the ends of relationships, to the shortness of the human life span, and to the book’s own looming narrative endpoint. In this novel, all things have an

The Agency of Men in The Atmospherians and How to Kidnap the Rich

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In the world of fiction, as opposed to the real world and its assumed male passiveness, men must make choices; they are not victims, but the owners of their mistakes.

The Liminality of Life and Death in Seán Ó Ríordáin’s Poetry

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Poetry as life and death—may I term this struggle as survival? Seán Ó Ríordáin, the Irish poet whose oeuvre elucidates this limbo, looks no further than to the interaction of light with dark to explain this compulsion for the letter as both cure and curse.

The Destruction of the World in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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Olga Tokarczuk’s newly translated novel has been marketed as a murder mystery, albeit a strange one. It is that, partly, but underneath the whodunit is another novel: one about how our obsession with usefulness leads to greed, and the devastating impact of both on the environment.

Writing While Biracial

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Leila Chatti’s poems subvert the expectation that she, as a Tunisian American writer, write as "just" Tunisian or "just" American—or just as the Tunisian American writer for whom mixed identity itself is the chief subject and source of conflict in her work.