Concerning My Daughter – Kim Hye-jin
Tightly structured, carefully crafted . . . no word, symbol, metaphor, or nuance is wasted.
Literature’s Lost Profiles: The Oblique Subjects of Parabiography
Splicing one’s twenty-first-century world with that of a historical figure is a multi-faceted labor of translation–not only across time, but across media, languages, and cultures.
Writing nonfiction . . . you really want to write about the big things that happened in your life, but I like to start from something super tiny or something seemingly inconsequential. . . . I’m always looking for the little, tiny ants in my mind that actually do a lot of the heavy lifting.
A Cigarette Lit Backwards – Tea Hacic-Vlahovic
I was, in my own JNCO ways, very much like Kat and maybe you were, too.
Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche – Vi Khi Nao
Suicide: The Autoimmune Disorder of the Psyche is brutal—so brutal that one wonders how its author survived to write it.
With translation, it’s like you can do the one-to-one or you can dive into the semiotic excess and see what happens, and rather than try to order the chaos, it’s more sequencing the chaos.
The Flowers of Buffoonery – Osamu Dazai
This creator of moody, Dostoevskian heroes—toeing the line between brutality and beauty, cynicism and élan—has the kind of biography that threatens to overshadow the work itself, and that’s before you realize that most of what Dazai wrote is taken to be autobiographical.
A Private Affair – Beppe Fenoglio
In Fenoglio’s narrative of war, everyone is equally dehumanized and every story equally absurd.
On Des Moines, the Final Play of Denis Johnson
Somehow, it was as if the playwright had invited the audience to his own wake, with the strictest of instructions that everybody for crying out loud have a good time.
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.