Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan

by Helen Mitsios (Editor)

Overview

Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan charts the enormous social and cultural changes that have taken place in Japan in the last twenty years. This collection of short stories features the most up-to-date and exciting writing from the most popular and finest award-winning authors in Japan today. These wildly imaginative and boundary bursting stories unfold fascinating and unexpected personal responses to the shattered bubble economy, sometimes with a playful magic realism, and sometimes by pulling back the covers on a dark backlash to the mass media immersion Japan's youth culture has undergone in the last two decades. Along with some of the world's best-known Japanese authors this collection will include writers making their English language debut. Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan will be the first short story collection of its kind to capture the unlimited range of imagination and excellence in Japanese fiction today.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013783928
Publisher:	Cheng & Tsui Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/29/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	259,095
File size:	344 KB

About the Author

Editor, Helen Mitsios also edited New Japanese Voices: The Best Contemporary Fiction from Japan, which was twice listed as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. She has recently co-authored the memoir Waltzing with the Enemy: A Mother and Daughter Confront the Aftermath of the Holocaust.

Editorial Reviews

Great stories rewire your brain, and in these tales you can feel your mind shifting as often as Mizue changes trains at the Shinagawa station in 'My Slightly Crooked Brooch...' The contemporary short stories in this collection, at times subversive, astonishing and heart-rending, are brimming with originality and genius" -- David Dalton, author of "Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol"

David Dalton

Here are stories that arrive from our global future, made from shards of many local, personal pasts. In the age of anime, amazingly, Japanese literature thrives." -- Paul Anderer, Professor of Japanese, Columbia University

Paul Anderer

How much does geography affect literature? The 19th century French literary critic Hippolyte Taine had a theory about this, a notion of what he called "race, milieu and moment" (something a little more complicated than it sounds). It's tempting to bring that seemingly outmoded paradigm into the foreground again while reading this new collection ... Read this review: http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-07-31/books/29832076_1_wind-up-bird-chronicle-novels-natsuo-kirino

Alan Cheuse