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It’s always nice to return to the office (last week I was in NY for a New York State Council on the Arts panel) to a copy of Contemporary Japanese Writers Vol. 2 from the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center (a.k.a. J-Lit).
J-Lit is an organization in Japan dedicated to publishing and promoting Japanese literature throughout the world. The mainstay of their program is the Japanese Literature Publishing Project, through which, on an annual basis, ten-plus Japanese books are translated into English and placed with publishers. Not only does the JLPP identify top-notch translators to work on these projects, but they also facilitate the sale of rights to American/British publishers and then, when the book finally comes out, they purchase 2,000 copies and distribute them to libraries throughout the world. Overall, a very admirable project that greatly benefits publishers.
(I do have my questions about the way the publishers of these books take advantage of this program, but in relation to this post that’s neither here nor there.)
Recently the JLPP announced it’s fourth list, which is centered around the theme of “travel.”
The connections between travel and literature are profound. People go to places removed from their daily experience, make new discoveries, and imagine new things. From the time of early works like the Man’yoshu poetry anthology and the chronicles of the Kojiki, there has been a wealth of travel literature – not only travel accounts per se, but also novels, dramas, and essays that depend on the experience of travel. Some works, like Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, have described fictive travel, of journeys to impossible places. Travel may further encompass not just actual, physical journeying from one place to another, but also travel through time, or the viewpoint of human life itself as a journey. Some travel might consist mainly of subtle shifts in consciousness. Literature itself could be thought of as intellectual travel.
I’m personally not familiar with any of the authors on this new list, but based on past experience with the JLPP, I’m sure there are one or two real gems that are included.
In addition to this fourth list, the JLPP recently released Contemporary Japanese Writers Vol. 2. This is a beautiful book providing overviews of 50 contemporary Japanese writers, ranging from Ryu Murakami to Yasutaka Tsutsui to Hideo Furukawa. (Just to clarify, a lot of the authors in here were born in the 1930s, so “contemporary” includes anyone working in the latter-half of the last century.)
There are also three special reports in the book: one on the Morning International Manga Competition, one on retranslations of world classics (such as The Brothers Karamazov, which sold 500,000 copies last year), and the “top ten mysteries” of 2007.
(Unfortunately the website hasn’t been updated to include info about this book, but there is some stuff on Vol. 1.)
For anyone interested in contemporary Japanese literature, these books are invaluable. The Japanese literary scene is so expansive, and turns over so fast (it’s unbelievable how many books are published there on a monthly basis), that overviews such as these are truly the best way to get a sense of what’s going on there. As I go through this volume, I’ll definitely write about any authors that really stand out. And I really hope the J-Lit Center keeps publishing these on an annual basis. And maybe someday there will be online samples to accompany these author overviews . . .
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Reviewed by Emily Davis
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately, and I’m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity”. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
