Blake Like News Today

Natascha Bruce translates from Chinese. Forthcoming translations include Mystery Train by Can Xue and Owlish by Dorothy Tse.

Experimental jazz saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi continues his ambitious homage to incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II with Hidemi.

‘The reader doesn’t need to have answers, but they do need to have theories.’ Lake Like a Mirror. In Chile it is morning and I am sitting down to write about translating Sok Fong’s stories. She tells me that in her piece she might write about ambiguity and my immediate thought is that in this case I might write about amphibians. When I was younger, I used to mix the two words up – ambiguous, amphibious: such similar forms, all those syllables – and even now that I know better, I thi...

Don Mee Choi. Photo: © SONG Got. Courtesy of Wave Books. It’s a cliché to say that reading transports you, but in a year in which I spent most of my days indoors, shuffling between my bedroom and my living room, the books I read really were a lifeline, a portal to an outside world. In the weeks before New York shut down, I luxuriated in my subway reading, laughing aloud at Alma Mahler’s antics in turn-of-the-century Vienna in Cate Haste’s biography Passionate Spirit, savor...