Livre Paris, France’s annual largest book fair, took place last weekend, and the invited country this year was South Korea, in honor of the France-Korea Year, celebrating 130 years of cooperation between the two countries. Interest in Korean culture has grown exponentially over the last few years. Lack of strategic marketing and distribution networks, cultural…
Sarah Viren is a writer and translator. Her poetry and prose can be found in AGNI, the Iowa Review, the Colorado Review, The Normal School, and others. Her translations have appeared in the Massachusetts Review and Kenyon Review Online. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, she has been awarded a Fulbright student fellowship to Colombia, a…
Taiwan is not China. Meet a Taiwanese person and one from mainland China and the difference is akin to the difference between an English person and an American. The schism goes beyond geography and flags. The rifts between the island nation and its gargantuan neighbor helped shape Taiwan’s literature. The Japanese colonized Taiwan around…
Lily Bart is nothing if not a master of self-denial, supremely talented at self-deception and shameless rationalization, which inevitably bleeds into her distinctive brand of morality. At the beginning of House of Mirth, Wharton is careful to clarify that Lily is not “scrupulous” in the traditional sense, but that she maintains the illusion of moral…
Sarah Death is a translator and scholar of Swedish literature. She edited the Swedish Book Review from 2003-2015 and lives in Kent, England. She has twice won the Bernard Shaw Translation Prize: in 2003 for The Angel House by Kerstin Ekman and in 2006 for Snow by Ellen Mattson. Her most recent novel translation is…
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow is a fiction and nonfiction writer from Singapore. Her stories appear in the anthologies From the Belly of the Cat (2009) and Let’s Tell This Story Properly: Commonwealth Short Story Prize Anthology (2015), as well as in the journal Mänoa. Her nonfiction work includes Singapore: A Biography (2009), co-authored with Mark Ravinder Frost and commissioned by the National…
Deborah Smith is a translator of Korean and the founder of a new non-profit London-based publisher, Tilted Axis Press. Recently, she has worked with Korean author Han Kang to bring her novel The Vegetarian to an English-reading audience. The book is a collection of three linked novellas about a woman who gives up eating meat…
Book Recommendations from Our Advisory Editors Ann Beattie recommends Salt and Pepper Cooking, The Education of an American Chef, by James Haller: “This slim book contains tons of information about coming of age, how one develops, and what part fate, friendship, and luck play in an individual’s life. As well as being humane and downright…
In 1988, when I went to Uruguay for the first time, the country was emerging from a long military dictatorship, and the capital, Montevideo, was a quiet, gray city that reminded me of Central Europe. The arts have always been important in Uruguay. You feel their presence everywhere—from the striking modern architecture that invigorates the…
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