Poets can’t help themselves from translating Dante, even if they are only going to do small chunks, as Byron did, having a stab at Francesca of Rimini’s speech from the fifth canto of the “Inferno.” He approached it the most difficult way, rendering “verse ...

That the Western world has lost interest in Japan, and particularly in Japanese literature, and is turning its attention more and more to the colossus across the sea (China, not America) is a constant plaint on the part of Japan specialists and translators. JASMINE, ...

A couple of years ago, the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, who knows enough about journalism to hardly ever give interviews herself, spoke to Katie Roiphe for the Paris Review. Except that she didn’t actually speak to her — or at least, not while ...

Like all the best fabled morality tales this one begins in a walk-in wardrobe. The wardrobe belongs to Paris Hilton and the interlopers into that strange fantasy land are a pair of bored high school dropouts who have wandered here in search of adventure ...

North America is not a land mass one immediately associates with gardens. China, Japan, Britain and France, perhaps, lay claim to the mind's strongest landscape associations.

Jodi Brett is beautiful, rich and intelligent. A psychotherapist, she is also, as A.S.A. Harrison’s debut opens, “deeply unaware that her life is now peaking … that a few short months are all it will take to make a killer of her.” Because her ...

Foreign journalists charged with covering Japan’s devastating March 2011 disasters faced an enormous challenge: sensitively expressing the human tragedy while accurately assessing the vast amount of real-time data on the crisis.

I asked a Japanese friend how he would characterize Shiba Ryotaro’s famous historical novel, “Clouds Above the Hill.” I’ve known its immense popularity, but Shiba had started its newspaper serialization after I left Japan in 1968, and the size of the finished work — ...

‘The difficult thing with a column,” the late Margaret Thatcher once told the journalist Jenny McCartney, “is thinking of something new to say every week.” Yes, indeed. BITTER EXPERIENCE HAS TAUGHT ME, by Nicholas Lezard. Faber and Faber, 2013, 304 pp., £9.99 (paperback) But ...

Qiu Xiaolong’s police procedural novels, featuring Shanghai police inspector Chen Cao, have gradually shifted from the earlier themes dealing with the deep wounds left by the insanity of the 1960s’ Cultural Revolution, and have more recently focused on social issues more relevant to present-day ...