Three Percent reported on how the National Endowment of the Arts have announced their 2013 Literary Translation Fellowships, and of the 16 projects funded (for a total of $200,000 spent at $12,500 per project), two of them are for the translation of Japanese literature. Below are the winners and a description of their project,...
Read more →As much as I’d like to review everything that comes out, I simply don’t read fast enough to review all the new Japanese literature releases here (also, I like to spend some of my time reading books that are not from Japan too). So obviously, I’ve missed a lot in the first six months...
Read more →Filmmaker and actor Beat Takeshi’s novel reads more like a movie, in ways both good and bad.
Read more →The race is on!
Read more →The Yomiuri reports that this year’s Iwaya Sazanami Literary Award, which honors achievements in children’s literature, has gone to 89-year old translator Nakamura Taeko.
Read more →This just in: The 147th Akutagawa Prize has been awarded to 35-year old Kashimada Maki and her novella 「冥土めぐり」(“A Tour of the Netherworld”), originally published in the spring 2012 issue of Bungei but now also in book form.
Read more →Via the Literary Saloon: In an English language article at the Asahi that is just sort of brimming with WTF-ery in every corner, a short story manuscript by Nobel Prize laureate Kawabata Yasunari which has been hanging around for almost twenty years was finally studied in detail, and it turns out it’s an adaptation...
Read more →Last week there was a great article fresh from the Tokyo Book Fair at Publishing Perspectives about Rakuten Kobo and Kodansha gearing up for the fight against the looming threat of the Amazon Kindle. They even made t-shirts! Lots of great stuff, but the bottom line is still that Amazon has the size, but...
Read more →For a while it looked like I was getting better and making proper announcements of new releases, but I stopped paying attention and now we have two new fiction releases in English: one from last week and one from the week before, and both from publisher Vertical. First, from two weeks ago, we have...
Read more →Japan certainly has no shortage of literary prizes, but the Asahi reports that the recently deceased former secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and psychologist Kawai Hayao will be honored with two literary prizes in his name.
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