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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...

Members of THE WHITE REVIEW editorial team, esteemed contributors, and friends of the magazine reveal the books they’ve been reading and revisiting in 2018     CHLOE ARIDJIS, author of BOOK OF CLOUDS   I really enjoyed LIMBO (Fitzcarraldo) by Dan Fox, WHEN WORDS FAIL: A LIFE WITH MUSIC, WAR AND PEACE (Granta) by Ed Vulliamy, and Bob Gilbert’s GHOST TREES: NATURE AND PEOPLE IN A LONDON PARISH (Saraband)   In fiction, I really admired the miniaturist beauty of Carys Davies’ WEST (Granta) This year I also revisited Bohumil Hrabal’s TOO LOUD A SOLITUDE (Abacus), a splendid little novel that packs more into its 98 pages than most books twice its length     JULIA ARMFIELD, winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018   My reading year has been characterised by sudden explosions in the midst of long dry spells Without question the most powerful of these was Elaine Castillo’s AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART (Atlantic) – a gorgeous and gratifyingly huge novel about home and finding a home, replete with food and music and spiky tenderness There was also May-Lan Tan’s short story collection THINGS TO MAKE AND BREAK (Sceptre), which I have recommended to almost everyone I know for its deadpan brilliance, its stories teeming with doubles Lastly, there was Camilla Grudova’s THE DOLL’S ALPHABET (Fitzcarraldo), one of the most purely original collections I’ve read, filled with strange and squirmy imagery, monsters and sewing machines and things with many, many legs     JULIA BELL, writer and Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck   The non-fiction books I really loved this year: Olivia Sudjuc’s EXPOSURE – a timely piece from new publishers Peninsula Press which explores among other things, why being published is much more difficult for women, and how we are often judged by a completely different set of standards In a neat pocket sized edition from a press to watch   The very much missed Mark Fisher’s blog has just been published by Repeater Books as K-PUNK: THE COLLECTED AND UNPUBLISHED WRITINGS OF MARK FISHER (2004-2016) This book is balm for the soul for anyone pissed off with the mess we’re in Clear-sighted, funny, and astute and at over 800 pages, satisfyingly hefty You won’t look like Scrooge if you gift this book I have already bought several copies   THE SECOND BODY by Daisy Hildyard (Fitzcarraldo) considers the relationship between human and animal bodies – a journey that takes her to butchers’ shops

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

fiction

November 2013

Surviving Sundays

Eduardo Halfon

TR. Sophie Hughes

fiction

November 2013

It was raining in Harlem. I was standing on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 162nd Street, my coat...

feature

Issue No. 5

Choose Your Own Formalism

David Auerbach

feature

Issue No. 5

1. ALL SQUARES RESIDE IN THE HUMAN BREAST In 2007 game designer and Second Life CEO Rod Humble wrote...

Prize Entry

April 2015

Les Archives du Coeur

Paul McQuade

Prize Entry

April 2015

The bike wheels skit and bounce on the loose dirt path. The smell of hot rubber and the smell...

 

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