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As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
This book, which appeared in English translation in 2010, is the tender love story of Tokiko, a married woman, and her lover Itakura.
The story is told from the perspective of Taki, the devoted attendant who cares for the house and the family who lives there. In this respect, the reader is dealing with the gaze of a marginal figure, and it is this which makes the book so great: Taki’s gaze is intimate, taking into account everything that happens within the home’s four walls, but is at the same time the cool gaze of an observer on the periphery of all the action.
The book plays out in the pre-war years, but it also depicts the war and the years following. Over the course of this long period, the reader learns that this isn’t just about the love that exists between Tokiko and Itakura. It is also about Taki’s…
The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan's situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in…
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
From the start, the reader can’t help but notice a tower looming in the distance.
The image has something threatening about it, and also deeply significant; the tower will continue to surface over the course of the novel’s unfolding, when certain fateful moments in the plot become clear, as well as the inescapable and hopeless nature of the main character entangled in it.
For me this book is so much more than “just” a crime novel, like it says on the cover. It is an existential masterwork. Slim, though so much is contained within its pages! The reader stays close at the pickpocket’s heels, following him breathlessly through a maze of streets, at the end of which stands the tower, appearing and disappearing in the distance. Nakamura has been compared to Dostoyevsky.
In my opinion, he doesn’t need that ascription. He is Nakamura – through and through. And for anyone…
Nishimura is a seasoned pickpocket, weaving through Tokyo's crowded streets, in search of potential targets. He has no family, no friends, no connections ...But he does have a past, which finally catches up with him when his old partner-in-crime reappears and offers him a job he can't refuse. Suddenly, Nishimura finds himself caught in a web so tangled and intricate that even he might not be able to escape. Taut, atmospheric and cool, The Thief will steal your breath away.
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
Now, I am no friend to graphic novels. As a novelist I prefer a story told in long strokes. For Taniguchi Jiro, however, I make an exception.
When I stumbled across A Journal of My Father, I was initially skeptical. Page after page, however, with an almost cinematic panorama laid out before me, I found myself in complete awe of the fine power of observation that Taniguchi brings to the small things in life. The simple and still finds artistic expression in his work, the every day suddenly seems notable, and anyone who – like me – often finds themselves reaching for a handkerchief, consider yourself warned: this touches you, though without a show of sentimentality.
After the death of his father, a man travels to his hometown and, through various conversations and encounters, pursues memories that have stayed with him since childhood. That doesn’t sound all that exciting. But…
KNOW THY FATHER The book opens with some childhood thoughts of Yoichi Yamashita spurred by a phone call at work informing him of his father’s death. So, he journeys back to his hometown after an absence of well over a decade during which time he has not seen his father. But as the relatives gather for the funeral and the stories start to flow, Yoichi’s childhood starts to resurface. The Spring afternoons playing on the floor of his father’s barber shop, the fire that ravaged the city and his family home, his parents’ divorce and a new ‘mother’. Through confidences…
As someone half-Japanese who grew up in Austria, I've spent the last few years making sense of my relationship to my mother’s homeland. My mother spoke Japanese to us children from an early age, and we spent many childhood summers with our grandparents in Okayama. Because of this, my mother's home feels intimate and familiar to me. But it is also distant and foreign, and it is precisely this unknown, the seemingly exotic and mysterious, that I hope to approach through reading. For me, Japan is a kind of poetic space I set my characters in. In my last three books Japan was both the setting and the secret protagonist.
It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen sometimes: you start a book only to find you simply can’t put it down. This was the case for me with Lonely Castle in the Mirror, a coming-of-age story.
At first glance the book seems like an entertainment novel with a fantasy element. Six teenagers slip through their respective bedroom mirrors and find themselves in a surreal castle with a mission to complete. Only at second glance does it become clear what this book is really about.
It is about loneliness and friendship, and about the painful process of growing up. None of the teenagers are really any good at forming relationships. And yet: by taking the risk and accepting commitments, the sense of responsibility within them grows, and they surpass themselves.
A magical parable. And who actually says that good literature can’t also be entertaining? It’s ideal when both happen at…
For fans of BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD, fairy tale and magic are weaved together in sparse language that belies a flooring emotional punch.
'Strange and beautiful. Imagine the offspring of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle with The Virgin Suicides' GUARDIAN 'Genuinely affecting. A story of empathy, collaboration and sharing truths' FINANCIAL TIMES
Translated by Philip Gabriel, a translator of Murakami _______________________________
Would you share your deepest secrets to save a friend?
In a tranquil neighbourhood of Tokyo, seven teenagers wake to find their bedroom mirrors are shining.
At a single touch, they are pulled from their lonely lives to a…
I was born and raised in New Mexico and it’s a part of me. New Mexicans will tell you that it’s impossible to describe its uniqueness, that you must experience it for yourself. That may be partially true, but writers have done a great job incorporating the majesty of the landscape, the earthiness of the people, the eclectic nature of its values, and ultimately the spell it casts. I’ve set quite a few books in New Mexico and have tried to show how these layers fit together for me. Ultimately, it’s called The Land of Enchantment for many reasons and we do our best to share them with our readers.
I was a fan of Anaya’s well-known novel, Bless Me, Ultima, and was intrigued that this title’s spelling itself was significant, returning the first ‘r’ to the city name a century after it was dropped by a white station owner. Anaya blends fantasy with history, examining the myth of racial purity and offering a different take on being a New Mexican and our connection to the land. He also departs from a familiar depiction of Albuquerque as a sleepy western town and paints it as a vibrant metropolis with all the associated political machinations. Mostly though, I felt a strong connection with the protagonist, an up-and-coming boxer who learns he was adopted and questions the definition of identity.
This book is a winner of PEN Center West Award for Fiction. Abran Gonzalez is a homeboy from the barrio, a young boxer whose world is shattered forever the night he is summoned to his mother's deathbed. He learns he is the son of an unknown Mexican man - a man he is desperately compelled to find. His quest will bring him in contact with many unpleasant characters.
I’ve always loved books about outsiders and stories that make you palpably feel what others do. In real life and fiction, the characters that interest me most are often outsiders. Because characters on the outside of social groups and norms are often isolated and lonely, there is something so powerful about works that can bring you inside their experience and relate what their inner life is like. Interiority is the great strength of literature, and stories that convey the inner architecture of outsiders have always attracted me. I love books that make me feel deeply connected and that linger in my subconscious long after I’ve read them.
I was immediately drawn into this slim book about small-time boxers in Stockton, California, trying to find some measure of respect. The sentences are terse and beautiful and contain all the desperation and struggle of small lives lived in obscure places.
Billy Tully, an older boxer, tries to restart his flailing boxing career as the novice boxer Ernie Munger is just beginning. Doubt, alcoholism, failure, rejection, hopelessness, and disintegration beset the path of both main characters, and they may share parallel fates.
There should be more books with characters like this because, as Thoreau noted, most men do “lead quiet lives of desperation,” and no book captures and expresses how this feels—in both style and substance—as precisely as Fat City. It is a beautifully written book, and the reality of the characters’ lives broke my heart.
'A pitch-perfect account of boxing, blue-collar bewilderment and the battle of the sexes' San Francisco Chronicle
A major cult film directed by John Huston
Stockton, California: a town of dark bars and lunchrooms, cheap hotels and farm labourers scratching a living. When two men meet in the Lido Gym - the ex-boxer Billy Tully and the novice Ernie Munger - their brief sparring session sets a fateful story in motion, initiating young Munger into the "company of men" and luring Tully back into training.
Fat City is a vivid novel of defiance and struggle, of the potent…
All these pugilistic narratives touch on people in hardship moving through dark spaces in their lives. I care about people on the fringes. I’ve known many people who have little or nothing. For a lot of my life, I’ve had little. I used to box. When something’s in your blood, you think about it every day. I can’t remember a day I haven’t thought about boxing. Once you’ve done it, it’s hard not to want to go back. You try to just pretend it away, but when it’s in you, it’s got hold. Because I understand this so well, feel it, have lived it, I absorb these boxing stories in a different kind of way.
The mantra for this novel could be that the effort matters more than anything—the attempt, the trying. Winning is something, but it’s not everything. Brooks, a high-school dropout, has to find his way in a world where his closest friend is dying from drug addiction, his household is broken, and street thugs are after him. Against all odds, if you love something and want it, the pursuit of that dream can help those who chase it with enough intensity to possibly overcome the hardship. When so many boxing stories are written with utter bleakness, there is light here.
The breakthrough modern sports novel The Contender shows readers the true meaning of being a hero.
This acclaimed novel by celebrated sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in YA fiction, is the story of a young boxer in Harlem who overcomes hardships and finds hope in the ring on his path to becoming a contender.
Alfred Brooks is scared. He’s a high-school dropout, and his grocery store job is leading nowhere. His best friend is sinking further and further into drug addiction. Some street kids are after him for something he didn’t…
Did you know that boxing is the number one fitness trend in America, outpacing spinning and yoga? It’s a workout that engages the mind and the body, incorporating strength training, cardio, and reflexes. But why is this good for children? Self-confidence! Self-discipline! Healthy lifestyle! The value of hard work! Meeting people who are different from you. All three of my children have gravitated to boxing. My son started at age 8 and continues to train as a college student. My middle daughter trained for the Golden Gloves as her COVID-19 pandemic focus. My oldest daughter has recently found her way into boxing after graduating from Rhode Island College of Design.
Joe Louis was one the greatest boxers of all time and a symbol of hope for Black Americans.
Joe famously fought Nazi Germany’s representative Max Schmeling, but what isn’t widely known is that Joe Lewis fought him twice, the first time losing to him. His rematch, in 1938, united Americans against Adolf Hitler. After his victory, he enlisted in the Army, fighting twice more. By the time he retired, Joe Lewis was described as perhaps the best heavyweight fighter of all time.”
Joe Louis was a fighter, a world champion boxer, a "punching machine." But more important, Joe Louis was a hero. At the beginning of his fighting career, he was a hero and a symbol of hope to African Americans. Later, Joe Louis became a hero to all Americans, uniting blacks and white boxing fans in their hatred of the Nazis and their desire for him to beat the German fighter Max Schmeling.
With powerful text and luminous illustrations, the award-winning, picture-book team of David A. Adler and Terry Widenerhas brought to life the true story of one determined individual who…
Did you know that boxing is the number one fitness trend in America, outpacing spinning and yoga? It’s a workout that engages the mind and the body, incorporating strength training, cardio, and reflexes. But why is this good for children? Self-confidence! Self-discipline! Healthy lifestyle! The value of hard work! Meeting people who are different from you. All three of my children have gravitated to boxing. My son started at age 8 and continues to train as a college student. My middle daughter trained for the Golden Gloves as her COVID-19 pandemic focus. My oldest daughter has recently found her way into boxing after graduating from Rhode Island College of Design.
Muhammad Ali’s story is told in lyrical free verse, which is very appropriate for the G.O.A.T., who is also famous for his rhyming poetry, such as “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. The hands can’t hit what the eye can’t see.”
Beginning with an overview of the great Black boxers before Ali, this picture book engagingly tells his story as the greatest boxer of all time.
In the history of legendary boxers, there was Joe Louis and Sonny Liston . . . and then, “the heavens opened up, and there appeared a great man descending on a cloud, jump-roping into the Kingdom of Boxing. And he was called Cassius Clay.” Clay let everyone know that he was the greatest boxer in the world. He converted to the Nation of Islam, refused to be drafted into a war in which he didn’t believe, and boxed his way back to the top after being stripped of his title. The man that came to be known as Muhammad Ali…
All these pugilistic narratives touch on people in hardship moving through dark spaces in their lives. I care about people on the fringes. I’ve known many people who have little or nothing. For a lot of my life, I’ve had little. I used to box. When something’s in your blood, you think about it every day. I can’t remember a day I haven’t thought about boxing. Once you’ve done it, it’s hard not to want to go back. You try to just pretend it away, but when it’s in you, it’s got hold. Because I understand this so well, feel it, have lived it, I absorb these boxing stories in a different kind of way.
Heinz takes the day-to-day minutia of being a boxer and makes it something beautiful. While the novel follows Eddie Brown’s quest for the middleweight title, told from the cynical perspective of sportswriter Frank Hughes, what’s really being relayed is everything it takes to build up to the one moment so few people ever face—that one-on-one in the ring you’ve got nowhere to run from the truth, from yourself. Did you prepare enough? Did you give it your all? And just who in the hell are you, really?
Originally published in 1958, The Professional is the story of boxer Eddie Brown's quest for the middleweight championship of the world. But it is so much more. W. C. Heinz not only serves up a realistic depiction of the circus-like atmosphere around boxing with its assorted hangers-on, crooked promoters, and jaded journalists, but he gives us two memorable characters in Eddie Brown and in Brown's crusty trainer, Doc Carroll. They are at the heart of this poignant story as they bond together with their eye on the only prize that matters,the middleweight championship. The Professional is W. C. Heinz at…
