Translated from Lao by Bounheng Inversin, Roger Rumpf, Jacqui Chagnon, Thipason Phimviengkham and William GallowayPublished by University of Washington Press, 1999, 198 pages. A poor cobbler finds a way to make his contribution to his country's war effort; a young man offers strangers lifts on his bicycle; and a young woman tries to return a …
Continue reading Mother’s Beloved—Stories from Laos: Outhine Bounyavong
Published by Picador, 2020, 992 pages. “...the Signal might already have the ability to manipulate its environment in subtle ways. In minds, where it can be thought, an idea can finally find some kind of expression. It can influence the behaviour of the person who thinks it. It can inspire people to spread the idea. …
Gail Anderson-Dargatz is a Canadian writer. Her first novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, won the UK’s Betty Trask Award, the BC Book Prize for Fiction, and the VanCity Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her other books …
Continue reading Domestic Thrillers and Rural Communities: An Interview with Gail Anderson-Dargatz
Published by Harper Avenue, 2021, 304 pages. “What you see in the bush is rarely what’s really there.” Kira is engaged to the handsome and rich Aaron with whom she has a child, Evie. They live in a beautiful house with Olive, Aaron’s 13-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Aaron loves his daughters and seems …
Published by Chatto & Windus, 2021, 304 pages. “Across the heart of Asia, at the ancient convergence of steppe and forest, the grasslands of Mongolia move towards Siberia in a grey-green sea. ... “Somewhere deep in this hinterland rises one of the most formidable rivers on earth. It drains a basin twice the size of …
Continue reading The Amur River—Between Russia and China: Colin Thubron
Published by Austin Macauly Publishers, 2022, 222 pages. Three girls playing in a forest are pestered by a young boy. When they cannot get rid of him, they throw him into a nearby river to teach him a lesson. They expect him to crawl out, repentant. But the boy drowns. When the girls realize they …
Translated from Estonian by Matthew HydePublished by Vagabond Voices, 2017, 176 pages. Original version published in 2015. On 20 August 1991, Estonia formally declared its independence from the Soviet Union, even as Soviet authorities were trying to crush this movement. Set during the last days of the Soviet Union in Estonia, The Death of the …
Continue reading The Death of the Perfect Sentence: Rein Raud
Published by Simon & Schuster and Harper Collins, 2001, 272 pages. “... I decided that I wanted to write a book about life. Just life itself. What I’ve learned by living more than seventy years of it. ... “I have no wish to play the pontificating fool, pretending that I've suddenly come up with the …
Published by Penguin/Random House, 2021, 384 pages. This is the story of a Ugandan family of Indian origin, told from the perspectives of two men: Hasan in 1960s Kampala, who writes letters to his dead wife, and Sameer, a young ambitious man in London in the mid-2000s. Hasan’s family is originally from Gujarat, but he …
Photo: Jennifer Croft Boris Dralyuk is a poet, literary translator, and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His collection of poems, My Hollywood and Other Poems, was published in April 2022. He has also written Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934; edited 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian …
Continue reading Bringing the Past to Life: Interview with Boris Dralyuk
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