The aptly titled Convenience Store Woman is Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata’s tenth novel, and the first to be translated into English. The story focuses on Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six year old single woman who works at a ‘Smile Mart’ Tokyo convenience store. Furukura is not only content, but happy with her life as a convenience…
Author: Kelly Hydrick
“But wars are dense with causes and effects, calculations and strange attractors, and all the more so are wars in time. One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red’s hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet. Or her…
Climate Change Reading Suggestions In Parts One and Two of this climate change and literature series I explored whether climate change is well-represented in fiction. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that modern literary fiction does not adequately represent climate change issues. He contends that we have been suffering from a lack of cultural…
Part One of this series outlined a brief history of climate change and charted how the numbers of non-fiction climate change publications have changed over time. The enormous spatial and temporal scope of climate change has led to a cultural “disbelief” and “failure of imagination” which seems to affect the ways in which we tell…
“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” – Jessamyn West (To See the Dream, 1956) Introduction “In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first…
Provocative as in to provoke, as in to provoke interest. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: conversation is flirtation. Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation I greatly enjoyed Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, although I toiled through the first seventy pages or so and I started writing a very different review…
*Note: This review has been updated (as of 1/25/2020) to reflect the controversy surrounding the author and her depiction of the migrant experience, a story that she arguably had little right to tell. I failed to consider this information when I wrote my review, but I am including it now after several people (thank you!)…
She would walk along that basement corridor for another twenty-six years, each day cut and folded by the belief that just beyond the museum’s worn paths and daily rituals, there lies the possibility of something wholly unimaginable. Christine Coulson, Metropolitan Stories In Metropolitan Stories, Christine Coulson’s debut novel, the mighty and the miniscule denizens of…
TEN years ago I volunteered as an English as a Foreign Language tutor for a refugee resettlement agency in central Pennsylvania. During that time I worked with a Christian Karen family from south-eastern Myanmar*: father, mother, and their nine month old son who had been born in the U.S. One day a week, after I…
Recently, BookBrowse sent me a copy of a short story collection by “one of America’s best kept secrets”: Lucia Berlin’s Evening In Paradise: More Stories. Berlin evokes Shirley Jackson (minus the gothic vibes) and Raymond Carver in these twenty-two stories. Most of the stories are indeed short, some are almost vignettes, which I think is…