"Mister Yam - a twentysomething-year-old man disillusioned with corporate work in San Francisco - would find his life forever changed after an inexplicable phone call with a strange woman and an invitation to a musical show. Thus begins a series of events that would take Mister Yam chasing nameless figures across the country; solving a mystery only he can explain"-- Page [4] of cover.

A novella about a girl living in a remote mountain village who finds out there is more to the world than she imagines.

“A significant contribution to the body of English language scholarship and translation of Japanese proletarian literature. Highly recommended.” —Choice Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imaginations and craft to tackling the ensuing injustices, with results that captured both middle-class and worker-farmer readers. This anthology is a landmark introduction to Japanese proletarian literature from that period. Contextualized by introductory essays, forty expertly translated stories touch on topics like perilous factories, predatory bosses, ethnic discrimination, and the myriad indignities of poverty. Together, they show how even intensely personal issues form a pattern of oppression. Fostering labor consciousness as part of an international leftist arts movement, these writers were also challenging the institution of modern literature itself. This anthology demonstrates the vitality of the “red decade” long buried in modern Japanese literary history. “The thread of thought underlying the stories . . . is, as Edmund Wilson eloquently established in To the Finland Station, one of the fundamental components of our contemporary consciousness.” —Kyoto Journal “An essential guidebook for navigating twentieth-century Japan’s literary and political terrain.” —Edward Fowler, University of California, Irvine, author of San’ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo “Excellent translations of excellent writers.” —John Whitter Treat, Yale University, author of The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature “Lucidly structured. . . . The editors have also made the welcome decision to retain self-censored and suppressed passages.” —Japan Times “Engaging and in-depth.” —Japan Studies

In Laura Fish's ambitious and captivating novel, three very different women struggle for freedom. While Elizabeth Barrett Browning is confined to bed, chafing against the restriction of her doctors and writing poetry and fretful letters, at her family's Jamaican estate Kaydia, the Creole housekeeper, tries to protect her daughter from their predatory master; and a recently freed black slave, Sheba, mourns the loss of her lover. As Elizabeth, a passionate abolitionist, struggles to come to terms with the source of her wealth and privilege both Sheba and Kydia fight to escape a tragic past which seems ever-present. The resulting novel is an extraordinary evocation of the dark side of the nineteenth-century that is both horrifying and ultimately redeeming.

Set in London in the 1970s,Rag & Bone Man is a picaresque chronicle of a man trying to put his life back together. Hendershot is a Canadian who went to England to play professional hockey. Now that career is on hold, his battered body recovering from hockey games and street fights in the downtrodden back alleys of London. His roommate is a 70-year-old pensioner whose hobby is shadowing IRA terrorists, real or imagined. He also works as an artist’s model, and the mesmerizing artist, Margaret, is also his landlady. Rag & Bone Man follows Hendershot as he struggles to find a way out of his situation. Steeled with gritty optimism, he pushes himself to get back into game shape in between studio sittings. To keep boredom at bay he joins his geriatric roommate in his quest to uncover IRA terrorists — a breadcrumb trail that seems to lead back to the enigmatic Margaret. And all of it seems to be working, sort of, until the day everything radically spins out of control.

An exhaustive reference work for Wambule/Tibeto-Burman linguistics, language typology, linguistic theory "and" Wambule society and culture, and as such indispensable for any linguistic and anthropological library.