A Weeping Tree of His Own: Yasunari Kawabata’s Dandelions
Blindness as a concept is central to Kawabata’s novel, where every character is blind to something.
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Posts Tagged: Japan
This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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On Birds, Cats, and Children
My devotion to the cats was not an imitation of human motherhood. To confuse the two, I thought, was an insult to both.
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...moreThis Week in Independent Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...moreAlbum of the Week: Mellow Waves by Cornelius
Cornelius is the alter ego of the legendary Japanese composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Keigo Oyamada. Twenty years after releasing their iconic album Fantasma in 1997, and putting an end to an eleven-year-long silence, the Tokyo-based musician and his band are now back with Mellow Waves, out now via Rostrum Records. Having shifted from the postmodern cut-and-paste […]
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Lone Star Cinema
In clinging to a set of memories that fade more every day, maybe I’m also clinging to an idyllic version of my own past.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A Jordanian bookseller opened a 24-hour “Emergency Room for the Mind” that offers life-affirming literature. One Seattle-area bookstore thinks to the key to success is more competition and is seeking out a neighboring bookstore to open nearby. Bucharest, Romania is getting two new bookstores.
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Finishing What You Start: A Conversation with Musician Matt Kivel
Matt Kivel discusses his latest release, Fires on the Plain, the ways in which cinema inspires his music, and how he reads his critics.
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Storytelling Is a Search: An Interview with Sequoia Nagamatsu
Sequoia Nagamatsu discusses his debut collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, grief as a character, and the intersection of ancient myth and the modern world.
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The Rumpus Interview With Danielle Trussoni
Danielle Trussoni discusses her new memoir, The Fortress, black magic, the cult of marriage, and the dark side of storytelling.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
An eight-time Jeopardy! winner is turning the cash into his dream: a bookstore. City Lights in San Francisco is offering up a special section featuring resistance literature. Bookstores in Washington, DC supported the Women’s March and hosted events through inauguration weekend.
...moreThis Week in Books: The Light on the Wall
Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Revolution Books in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood is exploiting Trump’s election to raise money for a fight against fascism. People in Japan value neighborhood bookstores so much that local governments are opening government-run stores in an effort to keep community spaces flourishing. A fascist bookstore in Florence, Italy received a special delivery—a bomb. The […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Just announced today: beloved Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt is closing after 35 years in business. Independent booksellers were the focus of a panel at the Miami Book Fair—discussion focused on how big business was surprised that small business strategies could be useful in selling books. Kyoto, Japan is home to a bookstore hostel with eighteen bunks built into […]
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Multitudes: What Is a Haunting?
What cannot be forgotten/cannot be remembered?
...moreHome-Turned-Library Brings Japanese Literature to Community
For the Los Angeles Times, Kelly Corrigan spoke with Mitsuko Roberts of Glendale, California about The Okanoue Library, a collection of over 700 works of Japanese literature, film, and other media donated by Glendale’s Japanese community. Roberts hosts this collection a few times a month in her home-turned-library, lending out materials and offering Japanese reading classes.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Chicago bookstores are worried about the arrival of a physical Amazon store. One bookstore is using clickbait tactics on social media to trick people into reading more books. Some people actually like airport bookstores. A rural Virginia bookstore has become wildly successful.
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The World Bank houses a bookstore. Unfortunately, it’s closing. Harry Potter is causing a legal dispute between two bookstores in the Philippines, with one store claiming a legal monopoly over the book. CityLab checks out The Last Bookstore, a massive bookstore warehouse in Los Angeles.
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The world’s oldest gay bookstore is getting a new lease on life by adding a cafe and liquor license. Bookstores in small Japanese towns are closing down. In an age of unlimited choice, bookstores can help connect readers with the best books. The New York Times explores a Spanish-language bookstore in Queens.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: There Are No Good Muslims
I say I am Catholic because it is easier than telling the truth.
...moreNo Dancing, Please
FACT‘s profile of rising electronic musician Seiho Hayakawa serves as an introduction to the unique challenges the underground music scene in Japan has had to contend with over the years: While the internet and cheaper travel have helped break down many of the physical barriers that once isolated Japan, the way the music industry operates remains difficult to […]
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A Japanese Heart
If you follow the script, people will judge you as having a genuine Japanese heart.
...moreThis Week in Indie Boosktores
A charity bookstore in Swansea, Wales, had so many copies of Fifty Shades of Gray that the store built a fort. A Georgia store needs a superhero after more than $200,000 worth of comic books were stolen. One of the Hong Kong booksellers who disappeared last year amidst mainland China’s censorship sweep has vowed to […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told.
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The Slow Fall of the Hot Heroine
If nothing else, it’s the opinion of other women that encroaches on mine. Resemblances spark my joy; differences become character flaws.
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I Hear the Place That Can’t Be Named
It is remembering and loving anyway—not forgetting—that binds us even if the recollections are absurd, undignified, cruel, or humiliating.
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