Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 opens in the middle of an unusually scored Tokyo traffic jam: “The taxi’s radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček’s Sinfonietta — probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn’t seem to be listening very closely, either.” His passenger, a young […]
Roland Barthes first visited Japan in 1966, not long after the defeated and reconstructed country announced its return to the international community with the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. Japan would have hosted its first Olympic Games there in 1940, had World War II not caused the duty to pass to Helsinki. Now, half a century […]
Colin Marshall talks with David L. Ulin, former book critic at the Los Angeles Times and author of such books as The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, and the novella Labyrinth. He is also the […]
Colin Marshall talks with Brad Listi, founder of literary and culture site The Nervous Breakdown and author of the novel Attention. Deficit. Disorder. He also hosts the podcast Otherppl, on which, right here in Los Angeles, he has conducted “in-depth, inappropriate interviews” with over 400 writers about their lives, their working methods, their social media habits, and […]
Colin Marshall talks with J. Ryan Stradal, fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown, editor-at-large at Unnamed Press, and advisory board member at 826LA. He is also the author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest, which offers at once its own spin on the modern food novel and its own spin on the modern family novel, […]
Colin Marshall talks with Farley Elliott, senior editor at Eater Los Angeles and author of Los Angeles Street Food: A History from Tamaleros to Taco Trucks, a hybrid history of and guide to everything one can buy and eat on a sidewalk in this city, from taquitos on Olvera Street to illegal backyard Burmese restaurants […]
Colin Marshall talks with Amelia Gray, author of AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, Threats, and the new short story collection Gutshot, which showcases her writing at its most grotesque, its most hypernormal, its most speculative, and its most darkly funny. The book offers a portrait of her very own America, a country populated by Greyhound […]
Colin Marshall talks with James Sie, voice actor, onscreen actor, and author of a new debut novel, Still Life Las Vegas. This alienated young artist’s coming-of-age story in the decidedly non-glamorous part of Sin City weaves together Greek myth, family myth, and Liberace, doing so with not just text but graphic-novel sections as well. Sungyoon […]
Colin Marshall talks to Jay Rubin, Takashima Research Professor of Japanese Humanities at Harvard University, translator of such books as Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 (parts one and two), and author most recently of his own debut novel, The Sun Gods, a tale of the love and hatred between Japanese and Americans in postwar Seattle. You can […]
Colin Marshall talks with two of South Korea’s best-known novelists, Bae Suah and Cheon Myeong-kwan, as they visit Los Angeles on a trip with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Bae’s Nowhere to Be Found and Cheon’s Modern Family have both recently appeared in English translations. Colin also speaks with the Translation Institute’s president, Kim […]