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Before pocketing France’s prestigious Prix Décembre literary award a few months ago, Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint had already documented his international fame in fiction. In Self-Portrait Abroad, which has just been released in English, a protagonist named Jean-Philippe jet-sets around the world, speaking about his own novels at a circuit of international literature symposia. Each...
Jorge Luis Borges employed all manner of meta-mindbending devices in his fiction, but one of the most ingenious was the way that he would outline an entire novel’s worth of material in the course of a short story. Stripped of such niceties as contextualization and character development, the implication was that a few pages were ...
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What does it say for an author when her most widely translated work is also her most sexually explicit? In Japan, Yoko Ogawa is best remembered for 2003’s The Housekeeper and the Professor, the gentle, ambling story of an amnesiac mathematician and the single mother who works as his helper. But to readers in Portugal ...
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For over two centuries, mainland Japan’s only official link with the outside world was a cramped artificial island in Nagasaki Bay. Though it was initially built to accommodate Portuguese traders, Dejima would give a more permanent home to the trade mission of the Dutch East India Company. From 1641 until 1853, its residents provided Japan ...