What does translating the follow-up to an internationally beloved book involve? That was the question that translator Yuki Tejima faced when working on Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s book Totto-chan, the Little Girl at the Window: The Sequel. We spoke with Tejima about her process and the legacy of the first volume, along with an excerpt from the book in advance of an event this weekend in New York City.
There’s a lot going on in Karen Schoemer’s new album August, which blends her wide-ranging approach to writing lyrics with musical contributions from the likes of Mike Watt and Amy Rigby. We spoke with Schoemer about the making of this album, her work with Bernadette Mayer, and how August differs from her earlier musical and literary ventures.
In our morning reading: new writing by Maris Kreizman, the National Book Award winners, and more.
Travis Egedy has a lot going on. You may know him best from his musical work under the name Pictureplane or the designs he’s created for the clothing company Alien Body. Pictureplane has a new album out this fall, titled Sex Distortion, and we got together over email to discuss that record, Egedy’s approach to collaboration, and how the aesthetics of horror have shaped his work.
Ever since I first sat down with Nathan Ballingrud’s collection North American Lake Monsters, I’ve been enthusiastic about his work. The stories in that collection and its followup, Wounds, abounded with moments of dread both primal and existential. Film and television adaptations followed; then Ballingrud zigged when I expected him to zag, via the novel The Strange, set in an alternate past where other planets in the solar system can sustain human life without any sort of terraforming.
In our afternoon reading: writing from Colin Dickey, thoughts on the latest album from The Necks, and more.
Is the idea of a crime taking place in a locked room the most primal version of the mystery novel? As a young reader, I devoured plenty of mystery stories, beginning with the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown and graduating to Agatha Christie’s novels. Lately, I’ve been exploring the world of John Dickson Carr, whose mysteries also revolve around crime scenes that defy logical explanations.
You’d be amazed at how much mileage a story can get from a plant behaving like an animal, or vice versa. One of David Lynch’s early short films, The Grandmother, was about a kindly old woman who grows from seeds planted in the earth. Is it disquieting? Yes. And it’s no surprise that one of the most unsettling stories in Tomás Downey’s new collection Diving Board (translated by Sarah Moses) is about a horse that’s also a plant.