Fiction has had a pretty bad time of it these past few weeks, now that everyone’s over Tanaka Shin’ya’s antics and the general fervor over the Akutagawa Prize, and the bestseller list at Tohan has been a pretty sad affair. But from the ashes rises a tried and true bestselling author, Higashino Keigo. His...
Read more →So you’ve probably noticed lately that I just don’t post that much on the site anymore. When I started the blog I was unemployed, and now I work a full time job, and my schedule and workload has made it increasingly harder to put the same amount of time I used to put into...
Read more →Mitsui, Toshiba, NEC, and the Development Bank of Japan are working in cooperation to form the “Digital Publishing Organization” and investing a total of 150 billion yen, the Asahi reports. They are using this money to support the e-book distribution service BookLive! This kind of means that the government is trying to support and...
Read more →Monkey Business International, the U.S. offshoot of the (sadly, now defunct) Japanese literary journal Monkey Business has a new website, where you can pre-order the forthcoming second issue. Monkey Business was founded in 2008 by Motoyuki Shibata (that’s the western order of the name) as a sort of alternative literary journal. Monkey Business International...
Read more →By taking the week off, I didn’t get a chance to mention last Tuesday that Nakamura Fuminori’s The Thief and Ikezawa Natsuki’s The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili are both now on sale. We reviewed The Thief a few weeks ago, so if you haven’t read it yet, check out the review. It’s...
Read more →And we’re back! Sorry to disappear for a bit, but the break was greatly appreciated.
Read more →Hope you all have been hankering for poetry news this week, because today we have news of another poetry prize. The Asahi reports that the winner of the 12th Contemporary Haiku Prize and the 67th Contemporary Haiku Association Awards have been announced. Both awards are sponsored by the Contemporary Haiku Association (現代俳句協会). The winner...
Read more →If any readers out there live in NYC, you should head out to McNally Jackson Books next Monday (March 17th) at 7PM for a reading and discussion with Japanese translators Ted Goosen and Michael Emmerich as part of the really interesting translation-related lectures The Bridge Series. Ted Goosen is the co-editor of the great...
Read more →March seems to be a great time for poetry, as the winners of another poetry award have been announced (and we’ll have another one tomorrow).
Read more →Last week the Sankei Newspaper announced the winners of the Kishida Kunio Drama Award (but I didn’t notice until yesterday).
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