(Feature photo: “The Red Room” by Lucy Pulvers) Peaceful Circumstances is the story of Karen, a twenty-one-year-old white woman from Los Angeles. Sitting beside the hospital bed of her father, who is in a coma, she is convinced that he can hear her; so, over a single night, she tells him what happened to her More…
Category: Fiction
Review—The Memory Police: One Book You’ll Never Forget
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa (translated by Stephen Snyder) (Pantheon, Random House August 13, 2019) Reviewed by Renae Lucas-Hall This internationally-acclaimed writer transports you to a disturbing dystopian island where everyone and everything gradually disappears, leaving its vulnerable inhabitants at the mercy of a terrifying totalitarian regime. Imagine, if you will, waking up knowing More…
Killing Commendatore — A Self-Portrait of Murakami’s Literary Landscape
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen) (Harvill Secker, Penguin U.K., 2018) Reviewed by Renae Lucas-Hall A trend has developed over the past few years whenever there’s a discussion on Haruki Murakami or a review of his latest book. Murakami is a prolific writer, novelist, and translator who has written More…
Review—From the Fatherland, With Love
From the Fatherland, With Love by Ryū Murakami (Transl. Ralph McCarthy, Charles De Wolf, Ginny Tapley Takemori) (Pushkin Press, 2013) Reviewed by Andrew Douglas Sokulski From the Fatherland, With Love is an exhilarating, poetic, tearful, shocking, thrilling, and intensely realistic novel that focuses on what could occur if a force from North Korea were to More…