Category Archives: review

Review: Moon Scars by Ángel Luis Sucasas

translated by James Womack Nevsky Books March 1, 2017 139 pages grab a copy It’s not often that you’ll find four entirely different worlds inhabiting a single, slender book. But that’s exactly what’s going on in Moon Scars, a collection of stories by the award-winning Spanish author Ángel Luis Sucasas. Werewolves, technologically-sophisticated toys, magical underwater

Read More

Review: Frontier by Can Xue

translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping Open Letter Books March 14, 2017 470 pages In a surreal/unreal place called “Pebble Town” live men, women, and children for whom such concepts as time and geographical location seem meaningless.  “Frontier”, then, is quite the appropriate title, given that this particular word conjures up images of liminal

Read More

Review: The Cathedral of Mist by Paul Willems

 translated by Edward Gauvin Wakefield Press July 5, 2016 112 pages   In this collection of surreal, exquisitely-composed and expertly-translated stories, Belgian fantasist Paul Willems (1912-1997) offers us a multitude of dreamscapes both as delicate as gossamer and tangible as a mountain. Cathedrals made of mist, palaces of emptiness, dreams that melt into reality: you’ll

Read More

Review: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 2: Ambition by Yoshiki Tanaka

translated by Daniel Huddleston Haikasoru July 19, 2016 288 pages It had been a while since I’d read the first novel of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes series, but thanks to Tanaka’s no-frills, warp-speed style and Huddleston’s smooth translation, I had no trouble jumping right back in. And like Volume 1, Volume 2: Ambition

Read More

BTBA Post: Polar Bears and Cyborg Turtles: Some Non-Human Narrative Perspectives

(this piece was first published on the Three Percent website on 12/12/16 and was written for the Best Translated Book Award series of posts) I’ve only come across two books this year that take as their main narrator(s) a non-human creature: Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky; and Mr.

Read More

Review: Impossible Stories I by Zoran Živković

translated by Alice Copple-Tošić Cadmus Press November 10, 2016 422 pages Impossible Stories I is one of Cadmus Press’s first offerings in its Zoran Živković collection, and this volume is beautiful both inside and out. Through the cover art by Youchan Ito, and the translation from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tošić, we are able to

Read More

Charles Tan on Yoshiki Tanaka’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes Series

Legend of the Galactic Heroes: 30 Years Ahead of Its Time By Charles Tan While Western Science Fiction and Fantasy is currently experiencing mainstream appeal thanks to successful novel-to-TV adaptations like Game of Thrones, The Expanse, and The Magicians, the Japanese media industry has this formula pegged down as far back as the 1980s. Media

Read More

Review: Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction, ed. Mariano Villareal

Co-selected by Mariano Villareal and Luis Pestarini translated from the Spanish by Sue Burke and Lawrence Schimel Sportula June 15, 2013 258 pages Outstanding novella-length stories make up this important collection of contemporary Spanish-language science fiction. Thanks to translators Sue Burke and Lawrence Schimel, us English-language readers are able to see for ourselves just how

Read More

css.php