japanamerica

Portraits by Satoshi Kitamura I am both humbled and honored to be featured in the brand new Fall/Winter 2023 issue of the original Japanese MONKEY, the nation's leading literary magazine, in conversation with founding editor/scholar/author/translator Motoyuki Shibata on what makes a good sentence and the more granular mysteries of translating literature between Japanese and English. Among the authors we discuss are Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Cynthia Ozick, Denis Johnson, Jorge Luis Borges, Kyohei Sakaguchi, Don DeLillo, Rebecca Brown, Tim O'Brien, Amy Hempel and Ehud Havazelet. The lovely illustrations accompanying the interview are by artist and author Satoshi Kitamura, and Shibata's translation of Hempel's piercing classic, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," follows my interview. This issue (Volume 31) is now available in bookstores across Japan and online here .  Cover by Haruna Kawai