Reviews

  Unsuccessful at law, medicine, and the book trade, it was only by chance that Richard Englander discovered his skill at writing when he was in his 40s. The son of a wealthy Viennese businessman, Englander took the pen name of

  Brazilian poet and dramatist João Cabral de Melo Neto, who died in 1999, left behind a wealth of work, much of it chronicled in Education By Stone. The Collection pulls mostly from 1950-1980, the period of his major work (once Cabral

  A long-overdue bilingual edition of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poetry has just been published by Archipelago Books, a young literary press based in New York. Winner of many international prizes, Cabral first became known to English-language readers via a

  In the 1930s, too, Yom Sang-seop published what is considered one of the masterpieces of early modern Korean fiction, Three Generations, which recently appeared in a new translation by Yu Young-nan. Far from describing the atrocities of Japanese rule, Yom's novel

  If you’re reading a Hebrew novel in English, how do you know if it’s any good? Some things are lost in translation, as the old saying goes. One imagines this to be especially true for literary fiction, but if you don’t

  When people speak of “East Asian literature,” it’s not surprising that the conversation is limited to Japanese and Chinese writers. Almost none of Korea’s writers (with the exception of Yi Munyol) have been translated or widely distributed within the United

  Originally published in 1931 as a serial in “Chosun Ilbo,” and fluently translated from the original Korean, Three Generations is a classic work of Korean fiction following the tense dynamics of the Jo family in 1930s Japanese-occupied Seoul. Skillfully describing traditional Korean

  The Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945 remains one of the most crucial, and yet occluded and misunderstood, periods of modern Korean history. Often painted in black-and-white terms, the oppressive brutality of the Japanese is decried with righteous

  The three-generation saga is a Korean narrative tradition that dates back to the nation's very first story, that of the country's mythical founder, Dangun. And for some five thousand years, countless grandfather-father-son generations have kept this epic tradition alive, each

  The main representatives of the three generations Yom Sang-seop's novel centres around are the head of the Jo family, the dying grandfather, his son Sang-hun, and Sang-hun's son Deok-gi. Set during the Japanese occupation of Korea between the World Wars,