Last night, the National Book Foundation announced the winners of this year’s National Book Awards. This is the first year that the new award category for Translated Literature was given. To follow are this year’s winners, linked to Booklist reviews when available. For a full list of finalists, click here. Fiction The Friend, by Sigrid […]
Ready to get graphic? If you’re new to the genre, might I suggest you go directly to the godfather of manga, the late Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989). Astro Boy ring a bell? Speed Racer? Kimba the White Lion? “There’s a reason why the Japanese call [him] the God of Comics,” says Gene Luen Yang, the current National Ambassador for Young People’s […]
Graphic titles are big news. Even if you’re not a pop-culture connoisseur, you can’t have missed the graphic titles regularly popping up on bestseller lists—not to mention their various incarnations on film and even the stage! When Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for Maus, the genre got its can’t-be-ignored nod of mainstream (even highbrow) […]
Despite Maureen Corrigan’s rather nasty NPR review of Korean author Kyung-sook Shin’s 2011 Stateside debut, Please Look After Mom—her phrase “cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction” caused particular affront—Mom became a major bestseller. In a stroke of well-deserved vindication, Shin became the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize and has been credited with revitalizing the Korean […]
Mysteries and thrillers make up a sizable portion of the Japanese literary market. Thanks to the international success of Keigo Higashino, Natsuo Kirino, and Miyuki Miyabe—and, just as importantly, their translators—contemporary Japanese crime fiction proliferates on Western shelves. To follow is a list of both novels and manga (because no one does graphic titles like […]
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