Picnic in the Storm

Author: Yukiko Motoya
Publisher: Corsair
ISBN: 9781472154354
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique - which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon - until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room - and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face - to match her own. In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien - and, through it, find a way to liberation. Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, Picnic in the Storm is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearless young writers.

Picnic in the Storm

Author: Yukiko Motoya
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1472154320
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice 'In Yukiko Motoya's delightful new story collection, the familiar becomes unfamiliar . . . Certainly the style will remind readers of the Japanese authors Banana Yoshimoto and Sayaka Murata, but the stories themselves?and the logic, or lack thereof, within their sentences?are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders' ?Weike Wang, New York Times Book Review A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique - which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon - until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won't come out of the fitting room - and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband's features are beginning to slide around his face - to match her own. In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien - and, through it, find a way to liberation. Winner of the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, Picnic in the Storm is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearless young writers.

Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Author: Mohammed Hanif
Publisher: Bond Street Books
ISBN: 0385677286
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
From the author of the universally acclaimed debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes: a subversive, often shockingly funny new novel set in steaming Karachi, about second chances, thwarted ambitions, and love in the most unlikely places. The patients of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments need a miracle, and Alice Bhatti may be just what they're looking for. She's the new junior nurse, but that's the only thing ordinary about her. Her father is a part-time healer in the French Colony, Karachi's Christian slum--and it seems she has inherited his part-time gift. With a bit of begrudging but inspired improvisation, Alice brings succour to the patients lining the hospital's corridors. Yet, a Christian in an Islamic world, she is ensnared in the red tape of hospital bureaucracy, trapped by the caste system, and torn between her duty to her patients, her father, and her husband--an apprentice to the nefarious "Gentlemen's Squad" of the police, and about to plunge them both into a situation so dangerous that perhaps not even a miracle can save them. But, of course, Alice Bhatti is no ordinary nurse...

Touring The Land of the Dead

Author: Maki Kashimada
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609456521
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 99

Book Description
“A delicate, layered exploration of family, trauma, and memory . . . An intriguing introduction to a significant voice in contemporary Japanese fiction.” —Kirkus Reviews Two tales about memory, loss and love, both told with stylistic inventiveness and breath-taking sensitivity. Taichi was forced to stop working almost a decade ago and since then he and his wife Natsuko have been getting by on her wages. But Natsuko is a woman accustomed to hardship. When her own family’s fortune dried up years during her childhood, she lived a surreal hand-to-mouth existence shaped by her mother’s refusal to accept her family’s new station in life. When Natsuko sees an ad for a spa and recognizes the place as the former luxury hotel where she spent time as a child, she decides to take her sick husband, despite the cost. But the overnight visit triggers hard but ultimately redemptive memories relating to the complicated history of her family. Modelled on a classic story by Junichiro Tanizaki, Ninety-Nine Kisses is the second story in this book and it portrays in touching and lyrical fashion the lives of the four unmarried sisters in a historical, close-knit neighbourhood of contemporary Tokyo. “Magical.” —The Guardian, Most Anticipated Fiction of 2021 “An ethereal novel combining two tales exploring memory, love, and loss.” —Vogue (UK) “Kashimada’s writing is exceptional.” —The Spectator “While Kashimada’s stories, like Murakami’s, resist easy interpretation, the former revel in the beauty of experience, whether sorrowful or joyous, affirming life in all its strangeness, horror and mystery.” —The Times Literary Supplement (UK) “Only Kashimada can create this kind of world.” —Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

King of Joy

Author: Richard Chiem
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593763107
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 114

Book Description
Named a Writer to Watch by the Los Angeles Times, Richard Chiem brings readers a novel that is equal parts sledgehammer and sweet song--a neon, pulsing portrait of grief, and an electrifying story of one woman's survival against all odds. Corvus has always had an overactive imagination. Growing up, she develops a unique coping mechanism: she can imagine herself out of any situation, no matter how terrible. To get through each day, Corvus escapes into scenes from fantasy novels, pop songs, and action/adventure movies, and survives by turning the everyday into just another role to play in the movie of her life. After a tragic loss, Corvus finds a sadness so great she cannot imagine it away. Instead, she finds Tim, a pornographer with unconventional methods, who offers her a new way to escape into movies. But when a sinister plot of greed and betrayal is revealed, Corvus must fight to reclaim her independence, and discovers she is stronger than even she could have imagined.

Loudermilk

Author: Lucy Ives
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593763921
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
This New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, is "hilarious . . . a riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend" (The Washington Post). It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life. Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them.

Dead-End Memories

Author: Banana Yoshimoto
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640096108
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Japan’s internationally celebrated master storyteller returns with five stories of women on their way to healing that vividly portrays the blissful moments and everyday sorrows that surround us in everyday life A New York Times Notable Book "This is a supremely hopeful book, one that feels important because it shows that happiness, while not always easy, is still a subject worthy of art." —Brandon Taylor, The New York Times Book Review First published in Japan in 2003 and never before published in the United States, Dead-End Memories collects the stories of five women who, following sudden and painful events, quietly discover their ways back to recovery. Among the women we meet in Dead-End Memories is one betrayed by her fiancé who finds a perfect refuge in an apartment above her uncle’s bar while seeking the real meaning of happiness. In “House of Ghosts,” the daughter of a yoshoku restaurant owner encounters the ghosts of a sweet elderly couple who haven’t yet realized that they’ve been dead for years. In “Tomo-chan’s Happiness,” an office worker who is a victim of sexual assault finally catches sight of the hope of romance. Yoshimoto’s gentle, effortless prose reminds us that one true miracle can be as simple as having someone to share a meal with, and that happiness is always within us if only we take a moment to pause and reflect. Discover this collection of what Yoshimoto herself calls the “most precious work of my writing career.”

Belly Up

Author: Rita Bullwinkel
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 0998518441
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 127

Book Description
Belly Up is a story collection that contains ghosts, mediums, a lover obsessed with the sound of harps tuning, teenage girls who believe they are actually plants, gulag prisoners who outsmart a terrible warden, and carnivorous churches. Throughout these grotesque and tender stories, characters question the bodies they've been given and what their bodies require to be sustained.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder

Author: Yukiko Motoya
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593766785
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize and the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, these eleven surreal tales, set in the offices, zoos, bus stops, boutiques, and homes of contemporary Japan "are reminiscent, at least to this reader, of Joy Williams and Rivka Galchen and George Saunders" (Weike Wang, The New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice). In the English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers a housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique, which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking commuters struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon, until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A saleswoman in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won’t come out of the fitting room, and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her spouse’s features are beginning to slide around his face to match her own. In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien--and find a doorway to liberation.

Breasts and Eggs

Author: Mieko Kawakami
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609455886
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
A novel that “considers the agency . . . women exert over their bodies and charts the emotional underpinnings of physical changes . . . with humor and empathy” (The New Yorker). On a sweltering summer day, Makiko travels from Osaka to Tokyo, where her sister Natsu lives. She is in the company of her daughter, Midoriko, who has lately grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with adolescence. Over the course of their few days together in the capital, Midoriko’s silence will prove a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and family secrets. On yet another summer’s day eight years later, Natsu, during a journey back to her native city, confronts her anxieties about growing old alone and childless. Bestselling author Mieko Kawakami mixes stylistic inventiveness and riveting emotional depth to tell a story of contemporary womanhood in Japan. “Took my breath away.” —Haruki Murakami, #1 New York Times–bestselling author The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle “Kawakami lobbed a literary grenade into the fusty, male-dominated world of Japanese fiction with Breast and Eggs.” —The Economist “A sharply observed and heartbreaking portrait of what it means to be a woman.” —TIME “Raw, funny, mundane, heartbreaking.” —The Atlantic “A bracing, feminist exploration of daily life in Japan.” —Entertainment Weekly “Timely feminist themes; strange, surreal prose; and wonderful characters will transcend cultural barriers and enchant readers.” —The New York Observer “Bracing and evocative, tender yet unflinching.” —Publishers Weekly “Kawakami writes with unsettling precision about the body—its discomforts, its appetites, its smells and secretions. And she is especially good at capturing its longings.” —The New York Times Book Review