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Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You and Starling DaysShe is the winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award. Her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, an NPR 2017 Great Read and shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. She is the editor of the Go Home! anthology.

Articles Available Online


Cathy Park Hong’s ‘Minor Feelings’

Book Review

April 2020

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Book Review

April 2020

Before beginning Minor Feelings, A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition, an essay collection by the poet Cathy Park Hong, I sat with...
The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and interior place Han Kang wrote it whilst living in Warsaw, though in the book the city is never named explicitly Instead it is only a white city, white for its snow and white for its stone ruins In an interview with Granta, Kang said that when writing this book, she imagined her prematurely dead sister had lived and visited the city ‘in my place’   Photographs are interspersed throughout In some, a woman appears, her face obscured by shadow In others, only her hands are visible She holds a child’s gown She holds a pebble-like object covered in salt The photographs are of white objects, but in contrast to the white pages, they are startlingly grey The specks and splashes of whiteness are surrounded by shadow The woman seems trapped in darkness Who is this woman supposed to represent? The narrator? The ghost of the sister? The novelist Kang? All or none of the above?  The literal answer is that they are photographs of a performance by Kang, shot by the photographer Choi Jinhyuk But within the pages, they seem to carry the spirit of characters — and the novelist herself   The text is a loose collection of thoughts, scenes, and images Few are longer than a page They are gathered into three sections — ‘I’, ‘She’, and ‘All Whiteness’ ‘I’ follows the narrator considering the colour white and describes her sister’s passing ‘She’ imagines the sister’s life Some subsections describe what the sister might have done—having an X-ray, finding a pebble, attempting to befriend a dog Others contemplate white things—seagulls, a dead butterfly, a lace curtain   Both ‘I’ and ‘She’ are pensive and slightly sorrowful At first, this similarity is disorienting: it is hard to see where one perspective ends and the other begins Slowly, the reader realises that this muddling is the point The concern of the narrator is not whether the sister would have been a vastly different person, but what it means to replace one life with another Her mother would not have

Book Review

November 2017

Han Kang’s ‘The White Book’

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Book Review

November 2017

The White Book feels as if it is being whispered: each paragraph seems to come from some deep and...

The American short story writer George Saunders has the kind of reputation that makes one hesitate before typing his email into an address line It’s not really his outsize presence in the contemporary literary world, though this is staggering: he is the winner of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, while Mary Karr called him ‘the Best’ short story writer working in English when TIME picked him as one of the most influential people of 2013, the same year his latest collection, Tenth of December, won universal acclaim for its blend of emotional immediacy, familiar absurdity and ethical complexity What gave me pause, though, was his reputation for kindness, the theme of his (now viral) 2013 commencement address at Syracuse University Presenting himself with typical humility as ‘some old fart, his best years behind him’, Saunders used the occasion to tell his audience (and within days, the world) about his regrets All, he said, were ‘failures of kindness’ ‘Try to be kinder’ is the speech’s title and its soundbite: Saunders admits that it’s facile, but he also reminds us that as a maxim it can be really, really hard   His stories are violent, hilarious, confusing – but I’ve always felt behind them an animating spirit that was essentially, unfalteringly benevolent Mechanically, too, his stories feature characters striving to be kinder (and often failing): fathers struggling to provide for their kids, kid-veterans seeking stable definitions of ‘family’ and ‘home’, or wearied workers wandering clumsily through worlds strange but too much like our own to be labeled, comfortably, ‘the future’   Consciously or not, Saunders never presents himself as the artist-as-intellectual, artist-as-culture-hero, or artist-as-formidable-genius (though he is all these things) His writer-persona is the artist-as-gentle-craftsman, and his answers, as he explains his craft, are surprising, resourceful, cordial, given weight by the gravity of one preternaturally awake to wonder In the interview below, Saunders uses whatever tool comes to hand: metaphor, confession, concession, contradiction; touchpoints in his generous answers include Gerald Stern and David Hickey, Dylan and Chekhov, Buddhist thought and black boxes   Working on a Master’s dissertation triangulating Saunders among the post-postmodernists, I caught George at a

Contributor

June 2016

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Contributor

June 2016

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is the author of Harmless Like You and Starling Days. She is the winner of The Authors’ Club First Novel...

The Giving Up Game

fiction

December 2016

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

December 2016

The peculiar thing was that Astrid appeared exactly as she did on screen. She was neither taller nor shorter. Her smile had the same...
Harmless Like You

fiction

Issue No. 17

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

Issue No. 17

Interstate 95, September 2016   Celeste sat on the front seat wearing her black turtleneck sweater. She had three sweaters: black, blue, and festive....

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poetry

Issue No. 19

Two Poems

Sophie Robinson

poetry

Issue No. 19

sweet sweet agency   the candy here is hard & filled & there is nothing i love more than...

fiction

September 2014

The Fringe of Reality

Antoine Volodine

TR. Jeffrey Zuckerman

fiction

September 2014

Many thanks to those who have allowed me to speak; now I’ll do so.   I’m actually not talking...

poetry

December 2012

Off-Season

Miles Klee

poetry

December 2012

As a boy I went on a strange vacation with a friend. His parents took us, I can’t remember why,...

 

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