Persona: A Biography of Yukio Mishima
Yukio Mishima is about as famous as he is infamous. The enormous body of work left behind almost outshines his shocking public suicide after taking hostages with the help of his personal nationalist militia at a Self-Defense Forces base. In Persona, the first biography of Mishima to appear in English in over thirty years and ...
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HIPPO Reads: TED Talks for the Literary Set
Just this morning, Kaitlin Solimine (whom I was lucky enough to meet in Lisbon this past summer), launched HIPPO Reads, an intriguing new project: HIPPO Reads is a literary startup focused on curating and delivering high quality, previously published content with an academic bent. Think of us as TED Talks for ...
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This Is Insane [Insanely Cool]
From the New York Times Arts Blog: James Joyceās fiendishly difficult novel āFinnegans Wakeā has been called many things since it first began appearing in portions in 1924, including āthe most colossal leg-pull in literature,ā āthe work of a psychopath,ā and āthe chief ironic epic of our ...
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"The Perfect American" in Book and Opera Form [Weekend Reading]
Back in 2003, Other Press—one of the most interesting independent presses out there—brought out a book about Walt Disney entitled The Perfect American by Peter Stephan Jungk and translated from the Germany by Michael Hofmann. I remember hearing about this book from my friend Blake Radcliffe (which, I still ...
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Sin
Zakhar Prilepin is one hell of a writer, and an interesting figure to boot. Sin is an exciting debut in English for one of one of Russia’s most popular and critically-acclaimed writers. Though this is his first novel published in English, Prilepin has written a lot: four novels, three books of short stories, plus a ...
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On Submissions [We're Not Phone People]
Iād like to talk a bit about submissions. Because Iāve had a very stressful and involved week of cataloging, catching up with, and responding to every single submission Open Letter has received since essentially July of last year, Iām a little on the edge right now when it comes to submitters repeatedly asking about ...
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The Problem with Book Awards [Why America Sucks, Part Infinity]
Late last night, I came across this article about a new book award—one to reward innovative writing: [In reference to all the other book awards out there—Man Booker, Costa, IMPAC, Women’s Prize for Fiction, etc.] Enough to be going on with? Well, no. Not just because there can never be too many literary ...
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