Download or read book Winter in Sokcho written by Élisa Shua Dusapin and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman--a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French-Korean author

Download or read book The Pachinko Parlour written by Elisa Shua Dusapin and published by . This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Winter in Sokcho, which won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Women's calves, men's shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko in an apartment in an abandoned hotel and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by. The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven't been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, their tender relationship growing, Mieko's determination to visit the pachinko parlour builds. The Pachinko Parlouris a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel within a family. Crisp and enigmatic, Shua Dusapin's writing glows with intelligence.

Download or read book salt slow written by Julia Armfield and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2019-10-08 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award From White Review Short Story Prize winner Julia Armfield, a brilliant, provocative debut story collection for fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Kelly Link. In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women’s experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers’ sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan’s shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager entering puberty finds her body transforming in ways very different than her classmates’. As a popular band gathers momentum, the fangirls following their tour turn into something monstrous. After their parents remarry, two step-sisters, one a girl and one a wolf, develop a dangerously close bond. And in an apocalyptic landscape, a pregnant woman begins to realize that the creature in her belly is not what she expected. Blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism, salt slow is an utterly original collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock, heralding the arrival of a daring new voice.

Download or read book Pretend I m Dead written by Jen Beagin and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jen Beagin’s funny, moving, fearless debut novel introduces an unforgettable character, Mona—almost 24, cleaning houses to get by, emotionally adrift. Handing out clean needles to drug addicts, she falls for a recipient who proceeds to break her heart in unimaginable ways. She decamps to Taos, New Mexico, for a fresh start, where she finds a community of seekers and cast-offs. But they all have one or two things to teach her—the pajama-wearing, blissed-out New Agers, the slightly creepy client with peculiar tastes in controlled substances, the psychic who might really be psychic. Always just under the surface are her memories of growing up in a chaotic, destructive family from which she’s trying to disentangle herself. The story of her journey toward a comfortable place in the world and a measure of self-acceptance is psychologically acute, often surprising, and entirely human.

Download or read book Another Now written by Yanis Varoufakis and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would a fair and equal society actually look like? The world-renowned economist and bestselling author Yanis Varoufakis presents his radical and subversive answer in a work of speculative fiction that recalls William Morris and William Gibson The year: 2035. At a funeral for Iris, a revolutionary leftist feminist, Yango is approached by Costa, Iris’s closest comrade, who urges him to carry out Iris’s last wish: plough into her secret diaries to tell their story. “But”, Costa insists “leave out anything that might help Big Tech replicate my technologies!” That night Yango delves into Iris’s diaries. In them he discovers a chronicle of how Costa’s revolutionary technologies had unveiled an actually existing, fully democratized, postcapitalist society. Suddenly he understands Costa’s obsession with the hackers trying to steal his secrets. So begins Yanis Varoufakis’s extraordinary novelistic thought-experiment, where the world-famous economist offers an invigorating and deeply moving vision of an alternative reality. Another Now tells the story of Costa, a brilliant but deeply disillusioned, computer engineer, who creates a revolutionary technology that will allow the user a “glimpse of a life beyond their dreams” but will not enslave them. But an accident during one of its trial runs unveils a cosmic wormhole where Costa meets his DNA double, who is living in a 2025 very different than the one Costa is living in. In this parallel 2025 a global hi-tech uprising, begun in the wake of the collapse of 2008, has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratized. Banks have been eliminated, as well as predatory, data-mining digital monopolies; the gig economy is no more; and the young are free to experiment with different careers and to study ”non-lucrative topics, from Sumerian pottery to astrophysics.” Intoxicated, Costa travels to England to tell Iris, his old comrade, and her neighbor, Eva, a recovering banker turned neoliberal economics professor, of the parallel universe he has discovered. Costa eventually leads them back to his workshop in America where Iris and Eva meet their own doubles, and confront hard truths about themselves and the daunting political challenge that "the Other Now" presents. But, as their obsession with the Other Now deepens, time begins to run out, as the wormhole begins to deteriorate and hackers begin to unleash new attacks on Costa’s technology. The trio have to make a choice: which 2025 do they want to live in? Varoufakis has been claiming for a while that we already live in postcapitalist times. That, since the 2008 crisis, capitalism has been morphing into technofeudalism. Another Now, a riveting work of speculative fiction, shows that there is a realistic, democratic alternative to the technofeudalpostcapitalist dystopia taking shape all around us. It also confronts us with the greatest question: how far are we willing to go to bring it about?

Download or read book Untold Night and Day written by Bae Suah and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed Korean author weaves a “disturbing, beautifully controlled” metaphysical detective story “of doubles, shadows, and parallel worlds” (Financial Times). It’s Ayami’s final day working the box-office at Seoul’s only audio theater for the blind. Her last shift completed, she walks the streets with her former boss, searching for a missing friend. Their conversations take in art, love, food, and the inaccessible country to the north. The next day, Ayami acts as a guide for a detective novelist visiting from abroad. But as they contend with the summer heat, the edges of reality start to fray. Ayami enters a world of increasingly tangled threads, and the past intrudes upon the present as overlapping realities repeat, collide, change, and reassert themselves. Blisteringly original, Untold Night and Day upends the very structure of narrative storytelling. By one of the boldest and most innovative voices in contemporary Korean literature, and masterfully realized in English by Man Booker International Prize–winning translator Deborah Smith, Bae Suah’s hypnotic novel asks whether more than one version of ourselves can exist at once.

Download or read book When We Become Strangers written by Maggie Hamilton and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We're more connected, yet lonelier than ever - practical ways to combat the alarming rise of loneliness by bestselling author and social researcher, Maggie Hamilton. Practical solutions to combat social isolation in our families and communities. 'A timely warning shot over our collective bows...reminds us that awareness without action is worthless. A thought-provoking and challenging look into our future.' - Michael Carr-Gregg, psychologist and bestselling author 'Restores hope and gives simple, practical steps we can all take to feel safe and connected; as we build a new way of living and turn around the estrangement we all feel.' - Katrina Cavanough, CEO, The Kindness On Purpose Movement After decades of affluence, we're now busy renovating our homes, buffing and botoxing our bodies, and losing ourselves in passive entertainment and shopping, as depression and anxiety soars. And with the arrival of Netflix and Uber Eats, there's less and less incentive to leave home. Could our constant need for connection be messing with our brains? Is this why we're losing our ability to strike up a conversation with anyone we don't know? And given that so many of our kids lack one-on-one attention and regular touch, are we raising this new generation to be profoundly lonely? Right now, many of our relationships at home and at work, as well as in our communities are struggling. What, then, are the best ways back to belonging, and what might a more engaged community look like? Maggie Hamilton, author of What's Happening to Our Boys? and What's Happening to Our Girls? explores our growing loneliness and proposes practical solutions and an uplifting vision to combat the increasing social isolation in our families and communities.

Download or read book Convenience Store Woman written by Sayaka Murata and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction—many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual—and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action... A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.

Download or read book The Four Humors written by Mina Seckin and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wry and visceral debut novel follows a young Turkish-American woman who, rather than grieving her father's untimely death, seeks treatment for a stubborn headache and grows obsessed with a centuries-old theory of medicine. "[A] humane and refreshingly astringent novel." —Lauren LeBlanc, The New York Times Book Review Twenty-year-old Sibel thought she had concrete plans for the summer. She would care for her grandmother in Istanbul, visit her father’s grave, and study for the MCAT. Instead, she finds herself watching Turkish soap operas and self-diagnosing her own possible chronic illness with the four humors theory of ancient medicine. Also on Sibel’s mind: her blond American boyfriend who accompanies her to Turkey; her energetic but distraught younger sister; and her devoted grandmother, who, Sibel comes to learn, carries a harrowing secret. Delving into her family’s history, the narrative weaves through periods of political unrest in Turkey, from military coups to the Gezi Park protests. Told with pathos and humor, Sibel’s search for strange and unusual cures is disrupted as she begins to see how she might heal herself through the care of others, including her own family and its long-fractured relationships.

Download or read book The Same Night Awaits Us All written by Hristo Karastoyanov and published by Open Letter Books. This book was released on 2018-01-09 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anarchism, dissent, poetry, and the avant-garde mix in this playful retelling of the assassination of Bulgaria's greatest poet.

Download or read book Asleep in the Sun written by Adolfo Bioy Casares and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2004-08-31 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucio, a normal man in a normal (nosy) city neighborhood with normal problems with his in-laws (ever-present) and job (he lost it) finds he has a new problem on his hands: his beloved wife, Diana. She’s been staying out till all hours of the night and grows more disagreeable by the day. Should Lucio have Diana committed to the Psychiatric Institute, as her friend the dog trainer suggests? Before Lucio can even make up his mind, Diana is carted away by the mysterious head of the institute. Never mind, Diana’s sister, who looks just like Diana—and yet is nothing like her—has moved in. And on the recommendation of the dog trainer, Lucio acquires an adoring German shepherd, also named Diana. Then one glorious day, Diana returns, affectionate and pleasant. She’s been cured!—but have the doctors at the institute gone too far? Asleep in the Sun is the great work of the Argentine master Adolfo Bioy Casares's later years. Like his legendary Invention of Morel, it is an intoxicating mixture of fantasy, sly humor, and menace. Whether read as a fable of modern politics, a meditation on the elusive parameters of the self, or a most unusual love story, Bioy's book is an almost scarily perfect comic turn, as well as a pure delight.

Download or read book The Teacher written by Michal Ben-Naftali and published by . This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on true events, the story of a Holocaust survivor who spent her life trying to disappear.

Download or read book Clerk written by Guillermo Saccomanno and published by . This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Love, sex, and corporate slavery in a futuristic world from the two-time winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize

Download or read book Girl Called Eel written by Ali Zamir and published by Jacaranda Books. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anguille is a 17-year-old girl who leaves her rock on the archipelago of Comoros to lose herself at sea. She drifts between two states of mind and between two islands 'in a hollow maze', evoking her memories so as to forget nothing and so as to delay the inevitable outcome. Confronted with the pressing immediacy of imminent death, Anguille recounts the story of her whole life in one long, sustained breath, in a series of brief couplets. But what Anguille recounts, in an assured voice which heralds a shipwreck, is also something other than her life - something much deeper below the ground, or rather the sea, which has to do with the species and what is immemorial. It is the story of a fight for survival in which everyone becomes a predator. A story told in a single sentence, A Girl Called Eel is a memorial, a reckoning, and a powerful narrative imbued with a prevailing sense of urgency.

Download or read book A Greater Music written by 배수아 and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Near the beginning of A Greater Music, the narrator, a young Korean writer, falls into an icy river in the Berlin suburbs, where she's been house-sitting for her on-off boyfriend Joachim. This sets into motion a series of memories that move between the hazily defined present and the period three years ago when she first lived in Berlin. Throughout, the narrator's relationship with Joachim, a rough-and-ready metalworker, is contrasted with her friendship with M, an ultra-refined music-loving German teacher, whom, it is suggested, later became her lesbian lover.

Download or read book North Station written by Su-a Pae and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First English-language story collection from one of Korea's most exciting young writers.

Download or read book In an Ideal World written by Kunal Basu and published by Penguin Random House India Private Limited. This book was released on 2022-01-10 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Altaf Hussein, a young Muslim student, has been abducted from his college hostel. The authorities have washed their hands off the matter and the police are accused of a cover up. Rumours claim he has gone to fight the jihad in Iraq. More sinister rumours have him tortured and murdered for opposing the Nationalist students who are on a rampage to create a Hindu homeland in India, driving out Liberal supporters like Altaf and their decadent ideals. The divide between Liberals and Nationalists invades the Sengupta household in Kolkata when Joy, a bank manager, and Rohini, his schoolteacher wife-both compassionate humanists-learn the shocking news that their only son Bobby has become a leader of the Nationalist students and is implicated in Altaf's disappearance. Disbelief turns to anguish when they encounter his belligerent ideology and his not-too-convincing denial of his role in the Altaf affair. Out to solve the mystery of Altaf, Joy and Rohini discover conspiracy and hate, forbidden love and exceptional courage, come face to face with a world caught between the real and the ideal. But will they succeed in absolving their son of the heinous crime? Will Altaf be found after all? Or will they, and this fractured nation, pay the ultimate price for harbouring a fractured heart?