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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...

— Stay, Carmen! There’ll be cake! We bought it just for you! Stay!   It was twenty past seven in the evening, and Carmen wanted to go home She lived in Ladeira dos Tabajaras, two blocks away from her bosses on Santa Clara Street Carmen’s mother, Dona Jandira, never let her forget how lucky she was that she could just walk down the hill to her job in Zona Sul Dona Jandira had lived most of her life in Nova Iguaçu and had to start her commute to Leblon, where she worked, at four in the morning This went on for over 40 years How many times had Dona Jandira hesitated at the bus stop? She might have been happy if she’d gone and sat on the opposite bench and caught the bus to Juiz de Fora, where her parents lived Who knows, maybe she could have found a piece of land there, and even had the time to see whether her children really went to school when they left the house But the months went by and Dona Jandira never crossed the street, nor did she change buses Each day she got off in Leblon and each night she slept in Nova Iguaçu Then she caught an illness which ended up devouring her from the inside without her even knowing Carmen, who worked for the Ortega family on Santa Clara Street, was the only one of her children who stayed with her After Dona Jandira got sick, they managed to move out of Nova Iguaçu to Zona Sul, nearer to the hospital where Dona Jandira was being treated The important thing to Dona Jandira was that life was improving with each generation: Carmen didn’t have to wake up at 4 am She woke at 630 and by 730 she was already at work in Santa Clara It was a blessing   On the day of the cake, Carmen could no longer bear to be around her boss Dona Rafaela, her spoiled children who she had pretended to love for over 20 years, or her smarmy husband, seu Roco A strange name, but

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....

READ NEXT

poetry

June 2014

Oeuvres

Edouard Levé

TR. Jan Steyn

poetry

June 2014

1. A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being. 2. The world is...

fiction

January 2015

Shishosetsu...

Minae Mizumura

TR. Juliet Winters Carpenter

fiction

January 2015

This is an excerpt from the novel published in Japanese as Shishosetsu from left to right (私小説 from left...

Feature

Issue No. 19

Ill Feelings

Alice Hattrick

Feature

Issue No. 19

My mother recently found some loose diary pages I wrote in my first year of boarding school, aged eleven,...

 

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