Category: Fiction

September 21, 2021

Yury Tynyanov’s The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar: A Deathless Novel

By Anna Kurkina Rush

The short life of Yury Tynyanov (1896-1943) spanned some of the most traumatic upheavals of the twentieth century: world wars, revolutions, the Russian Civil War, the dark years of military communism, the waves of Stalinist purges, and the Great Terror....

September 16, 2021

I-Novel, You-Novel, True-Novel, False-Novel

By Jeremy Tiang

“Compared to the world of novels—of the imagination—the real world was a letdown.”      ~Minae Mizumura, Inheritance from Mother (tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter) Lo Yi-Chin’s Faraway tells the story of a man named Lo Yi-Chin, also a Taiwanese novelist, who...

September 14, 2021

Q&A: Ari Larissa Heinrich and Chi Ta-wei on The Membranes

First published in Taiwan in 1995, Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans...

September 7, 2021

Q&A: Pai Hsien-yung on Chinese Notions of the Afterlife and The Story of the Stone

The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system. The...

September 1, 2021

National Translation Month 2021! A Celebration of Diverse Voices

By Olivia Treynor

Welcome to National Translation Month 2021! Founded eight years ago, National Translation Month is an annual celebration of global literature. This September, we are excited to present an eclectic mix of books. Ranging from a beloved Persian epic to a...

August 24, 2021

Q&A: Juliet Winters Carpenter on Translating Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel

Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel, published in 1995, radically broke with Japanese literary tradition by liberally incorporating English words and phrases and printing the entire text horizontally, to be read from left to right, rather than vertically and from right to left....

August 17, 2021

Where Are the Women Writers?

The Missing Literature of Japan’s Edo Period

By G. G. Rowley

Writing by Japanese women flourished from the late tenth through the early fourteenth centuries. Almost all of the surviving works from this period have now been translated into English, some more than once, and many are available in editions suitable...

August 10, 2021

Mongolia’s Women Writers

By Simon Wickhamsmith

Since the Soviet-backed 1921 revolution, Mongolia’s writers have worked to find responses both to traditional genres and themes and to the Russian and Euro-American styles, and the three women writers whose work is translated in Suncranes and Other Stories—S. Udval...

August 3, 2021

An August Cemetery and the Ridiculous Task of the Translator

By Maria Vassileva

Maria Stepanova’s essay “Over Venerable Graves” is the very last text in our volume The Voice Over, but it opens the collection in which it was first published in Russian.[i] Its first paragraph serves as the cover image of that...

August 1, 2021

Women in Translation Month 2021! A Journey from East to West

By Olivia Treynor

Welcome to Women in Translation Month 2021! Seven years ago, blogger and academic Meytal Radzinski took a critical look at the publishing landscape and noticed that the world of translated literature was heavily male-dominated. Reflecting on this gender disparity and...

April 22, 2021

“You Aren’t the Center, but the Radius”

Irina Shevelenko on Maria Stepanova’s Kireevsky, with translations by Eugene Ostashevsky

“The chill of having no place […] is the only thing that gives poetry a chance not to participate in the parade of general achievements, not to wind up as a passkey that opens the doors for a third-party, external...

January 9, 2021

Peter Coviello’s Playlist for Vineland Reread

“Here is a mash note, a fan’s riff, a sizzling study of Pynchon’s most misapprehended book. . . . ” —Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark Today’s MLA featured post is a playlist from Peter Coviello to accompany his new book Vineland Reread, a...