Month: April 2004

Hiroki Sakai, the publisher of English translations of Japanese novels, talks to the Daily Yomiuri about breaking into the American market.

From a small office facing New York’s Park Avenue South, the president of Vertical Inc. said his main aim was to win the attention of U.S. readers. Last year, the company published 10 books, including Koji Suzuki’s “Ring,” Kaoru Kurimoto’s “The Guin Saga,” Kaori Ekuni’s “Twinkle Twinkle” and Osamu Tezuka’s “Buddha.” The design of each book cover is eye-catching and loud, differing greatly from those of Japanese editions.

I suppose the publisher is trying to match expectations of manga-reading Americans by using the garish color covers. Still, I think this is pretty cool.

Scott Kaukonen, who earlier last week had written an editorial for the Missouri Review about his experience submitting his collection to Zoo Press, has won the Ohio State University Press Prize in Short Fiction. Ordination will come out next Spring. Congratulations, Scott.

Nigerian writer Sefi Atta, who earlier this year was short-listed for the storySouth Million Writers Award has a new story up over at Carve Magazine. An excerpt:

We lived in the two-story house my father designed in Shapati Town, his hometown. Our plot had no street number, the street had no telephone lines. My father had had a brick wall built so high that armed robbers would need pole vaults to catapult themselves into the grounds. He must have envisaged them trying despite the odds. On top of his wall were broken bottle pieces; jewels on the crest of his architectural crown. In our garden was his concession to my mother, now an empty swimming pool, shaded by her favorite jacaranda and flame-of-the-forest trees. The pool was four feet at its deepest. My father, God rest his soul, could not swim. He had nightmares of dying by drowning–not by the bullet. That, he never expected in the fortress that was our home.

–From “The Lawless” by Sefi Atta.

The Denver Post tries to answer the question: How does one determine which books will have staying power?