• Archive for January, 2012

    Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation by Michael Zielenziger

    by  • January 31, 2012 • BOOKS & AUTHORS • 0 Comments

    The first 120 or so pages of Shutting Out the Sun (2006) are fascinating, and indeed, Zielenziger’s portrayal of a number of Japanese hikikomori (shut-ins), their families, and those working the help bring them back out into the public world, manages to be very thoughtful and compassionate, and even, at times, moving. Later chapters are...

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    Pardon the Mess…

    by  • January 31, 2012 • GENERAL • 2 Comments

    Pardon the mess, all: some of the links around here are not going to work so well for the next few days, until I finish tidying up my template stuff around here. The good news is, I love my new template (courtesy of PressWork) and I think it makes my blog much more readable...

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    The Dangers of Expat Writing: Fear and Trembling by Amélie Nothomb

    by  • January 30, 2012 • BOOKS & AUTHORS • 4 Comments

    While many expatriates have been great writers, in my experience, expatriates sometimes don’t do such a great job writing about the expatriate experience — with Graham Greene being a notable exception. They inevitably tend towards the same kind of thing that one sees in the expatriate blogosphere — the clever theorizing, the ranting, the...

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    Dark Gods by T.E.D. Klein, and a Question About the Depiction and Significance of Racism in Characterization

    by  • January 29, 2012 • BOOKS & AUTHORS • 13 Comments

    T.E.D. Klein is one of those writers whose disappearance baffles many lovers of weird fiction. After his celebrated novel The Ceremonies (which I have not yet read) and his collection of novellas titled Dark Gods, he seemed to go mostly off the radar, and to stay there (unless one was reading the right magazines,...

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    Playback by Raymond Chandler

    by  • January 24, 2012 • BOOKS & AUTHORS • 0 Comments

    What can I say? Chandler is Chandler — he does the thing he does, and he does it well, but I’m not sure I feel like reading the remaining novel in the volume, The Long Good-bye, right now. Apparently, a lot of people see this as the least of Chandler’s novels, something of a...

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