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…
Tag: fiction
“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…
One of the attributes I always revere when reading novels is an author’s ability to create characters that demonstrate both the ideals and fears of an age and the dreams and realities of individuals. In Jenny Offill’s Weather, we meet Lizzie, a mother and wife who is balancing a multitude of personal issues that are…
Colson Whitehead is one of the best authors on race in America. He has particular skill in taking the racial history of this country and weaving his literary characters around them – characters that are reactive to the bigotry of the period and who leave a legacy of resistance in the face of hate and…
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a transformative and inspiring book. The author, Ocean Vuong, was born in Saigon, was not literate in English until age 11, and yet has wrote some of the most eloquent poetry and fiction in the language over the past five years. On Earth is Vuong’s first piece of long-form…
*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!)…
In a spin on Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis,’ Booker-Prize winning author Ian McEwan has created a world in which a cockroach has transitioned into a man, and this man has the control of the British government. We meet the cockroach/human after he has already awakened in the body of what is the Prime Minister of…