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: review
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…
Ada Limón’s The Carrying introduces a deeply personal collection of poems and is recognized as her boldest work yet. Unlike Bright Dead Things, the National Book Award finalist which examines the ideals of a youthful and brutal reality, The Carrying presents its readers with a sense of longing and obscurity. This intricate collections tackles topics…
LET’S start with a confession: I am a historian and I have never read Gilgamesh. I didn’t read it in graduate school. I didn’t read it in college. I didn’t even read an excerpt in high school. I am a Gilgamesh virgin. But, perhaps this apparent lapse in my education was all for the best…
IF roses, all roses, suddenly disappeared, would your memory of them fade away as if they had never existed? This is the premise of Yoko Ogawa’s compelling dystopian novel, The Memory Police. On an unnamed island, ordinary, everyday things periodically disappear. Inhabitants simply awake in the morning feeling “that something has changed from the night…
Embroiled in a bloody civil war since 2011, Syria has long been subject to coups, repressive regimes, and state sanctioned surveillance.* Death Is Hard Work, the latest novel from Syrian author Khaled Khalifa, is infused with lived experience and captures the utter disruption of life in a war-zone. The author bombards the reader with all the horrors…