Angry Reminders: Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
Human beings like to make myths out of things we don’t understand. Modern mythologies—like comic book and science fiction characters—contain some of the metaphors for our greatest fears, our greatest...
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Sanae Yamada’s Favorite Foods
I spend a lot of time on tour, traveling all over the place for music, for many months out of the year, many years on end. I get homesick sometimes but it’s not really for a place—more like for a...
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A Space for Magnanimity: Talking with E. J. Koh
Eun Ji Koh was fifteen when her parents moved back to South Korea, leaving Koh and her brother alone in California. Years later, Koh discovered a box full of letters her mother had written over those...
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Cultural Attunement and “Otherness”: A Conversation with Aimee Liu
Best-selling author Aimee Liu‘s exquisite new novel, Glorious Boy, took her years to complete and proves itself well worth the time. Set before and during World War II on India’s remote Andaman...
View ArticleHomage as Provocation: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Sansei and Sensibility
What happens when an author transposes an iconic plot into a new cultural setting? In works as varied as Preti Taneja’s We That Are Young (based on King Lear), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and...
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On Relic and Recovery: A Conversation with Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn’s tenth book of poems, Foreign Bodies, is inspired by the Chevalier Jackson Collection at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, an assemblage of inhaled and swallowed objects Dr. Jackson extracted...
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Wingtips and Shell-Toes
I grew up the beloved only child of a father who—having moved on up from Sheepshead Bay to the Upper East Side—cared deeply about good clothes. His shelves held stacks of Turnbull & Asser shirts...
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Landscape as Mindscape: A Conversation with Michael Prior
The title of Michael Prior’s first book of poetry, Model Disciple, is apt description for the writer himself: Prior is a disciplined student of the poetic tradition, adept in sonnets, elegies,...
View ArticleBoth Trauma and Sin: Elizabeth Miki Brina’s Speak, Okinawa
I am mixed race, the daughter of a Japanese American woman and a German man. I look more Japanese than I do German, but growing up, I often forgot that my face did not blend in with the white faces of...
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Work Isn’t All Hardship: Talking with Kikuko Tsumura
I’m no stranger to burnout. My day job fills my waking hours with court dates, bureaucracy, secondary trauma, and translating bad news into my second language, such that at night, I can’t even decide...
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