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“One of Thailand’s preeminent female writers . . . Each of her stories poses its own moral challenge, pleasurable and unsettling at once . . . phenomenal.” —NPR.org In thirteen stories that investigate ordinary and working-class Thailand, characters aspire for more but remain suspended in routine. They bide their time, waiting for an extraordinary event to end their stasis. A politician’s wife imagines her life had her husband’s accident been fatal, a man on death row requests that a friend clear up a misunderstanding with a sex worker, and an elevator attendant feels himself wasting away while trapped, immobile, at his station all day. With curious wit, this collection offers re...
Winner of a PEN Translates! grant. Selected as a 'book to look out for in 2017' by The Guardian and BuzzFeed Books. In these witty, postmodern stories, Yoon riffs on pop culture, experiments with punctuation, flirts with sci-fi and, in a metafictional twist, mocks his own position as omnipotent author. Highly literary, his narratives offer an oblique reflection of contemporary Bangkok life, exploring the bewildering disjunct and oft-hilarious contradictions of a modernity that is at odds with many traditional Thai ideas on relationships, family, school and work. Praise for The Sad Part Was 'Evocative, erudite, and often very funny stories of Bangkok life.' -- The Guardian 'Formally inventive...
In a pink-walled motel, a teenage prostitute brings a grown man to tears. A lovestruck young boy holds the dismembered hand of his crush, only to find himself the object of a complex ménage à trois. A naked body falls from the window of a twenty-storey building, while two female office workers offer each other consolation in the elevator... In these wry and unsettling stories, Prabda Yoon once again illuminates something of the strangeness of modern cultural life in Bangkok. Disarming the reader with surprising charm, intensity and delicious horror, he explores what it means to have a body, and to interact with those of others.
The national bestseller by the award-winning Thai American author. “A brilliant collection . . . brimming with sharp-clawed survival lessons” (Los Angeles Times). Set in contemporary Thailand, these are generous, radiant tales of family bonds, youthful romance, generational conflicts, and cultural shiftings beneath the glossy surface of a warm, Edenic setting. Written with exceptional acuity, grace, and sophistication, the stories present a nation far removed from its exoticized stereotypes. In the prize-winning opening story “Farangs,” the son of a beachside motel owner commits the cardinal sin of falling for a pretty American tourist. In the novella, “Cockfighter,” a young girl...
It's June in 1970s Montenegro; school's just let out and Catherine's head is full of Boney M lyrics and playing 'cops and robbers' with her summer crush. Then tragedy rips the heart from her little family and Catherine's life takes on a new trajectory.
This pioneering work advocates for a shift toward inclusivity in the UK translated literature landscape, investigating and challenging unconscious bias around women in translation and building on existing research highlighting the role of translators as activists and agents and the possibilities for these new theoretical models to contribute to meaningful industry change. The book sets out the context for the new subdiscipline of feminist translator studies, positing this as an essential mechanism to work towards diversity in the translated literature sector of the publishing industry. In a series of five case studies that each exemplify a key component of the feminist translator studies "to...
With the acceleration of global migration, literature by migrant writers has emerged as a powerful medium for describing the ways in which global forces are experienced at the personal level. Migrant literature offers a compelling counter‐narrative to abstract visions of globalization, grounding large‐scale processes in real‐life stories of individuals. In Thailand, migrant writers have documented the social and cultural impacts of fifty years of rural‐urban migration through hundreds of stories, poems, and novels. Bangkok Bound is the first book to examine this body of literature and the messages that Thai migrant writers convey about their experiences. These stories powerfully desc...
Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.
In their stunning fiction debut, queer Indonesian writer Norman Erikson Pasaribu blends together speculative fiction and dark absurdism, drawing from Batak and Christian cultural elements. Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Happy Stories, Mostly introduces “one of the most important Indonesian writers today” (Litro Magazine). These twelve short stories ask what it means to be almost happy—to nearly find joy, to sort-of be accepted, but to never fully grasp one's desire. Joy shimmers on the horizon, just out of reach. An employee navigates their new workplace, a department of Heaven devoted to archiving unanswered prayers; a tourist in Vietnam seeks solace following her son’s suicide; a young student befriends a classmate obsessed with verifying the existence of a mythical hundred-foot-tall man. A tragicomic collection that probes the miraculous, melancholy nature of survival amid loneliness, Happy Stories, Mostly considers an oblique approach to human life: In the words of one of the stories’ narrators, “I work in the dark. Like mushrooms. I don’t need light to thrive.”
A novel of man's relationship with nature, power, and the vitality of storytelling, from beloved Thai author Saneh Sangsuk. The lovable, yarnspinning monk Luang Paw Tien, now in his nineties, is the last person in his village to bear witness to the power and plenitude of the jungle before agrarian and then capitalist life took over his community. Nightly, he entertains the children of his village with tales from his younger years: his long pilgrimage to India, his mother’s dreams of a more stable life through agriculture, his proud huntsman father who resisted those dreams, and his love, who led him to pursue those dreams all over again. Sangsuk’s novel is a celebration of the oral tradition of storytelling and, above all else, a testament to the power of stories to entertain.