T
his unignorably strange collection of stories evokes warring responses of admiration and disgust in the reader: Taeko Kono is a writer who puts the toxic into intoxicating. The selection, written between 1961 and 1971, is a brave choice for one of the launch titles in W&Nâs new list of modern classics. (Though the publisher that first gave us
Lolita in this country has never shirked controversy.)
The recurring motifs are sexual violence and masochism, the protagonists women who occupy mid-century Japanese society quietly, but conceal taboo longings. âFukuko liked physical pain during sex,â weâre told of one character; of another, âYuko had never been able to be satisfied by ordinary sex. she would demand violent methods of arousal.â
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Police have released video of the gloomy Gloucester cellar they are excavating in the hunt for the remains of suspected Fred West victim 15-year-old Mary Bastholm.
When I read the May 5
New Republic article entitled “Our Friend, the Trump Propagandist,” by Ronald Radosh and Sol Stern, I thought of the novelist Martin Amis and the late critic Christopher Hitchens. They were best buddies, but on at least one occasion they reviewed each other’s work scathingly. In his 2002 book
Koba the Dread, Amis excoriated Hitchens, a longtime self-styled Trotskyite, for soft-pedaling Stalin’s atrocities; in reply, Hitchens savaged Amis’s book in the
Atlantic. You might expect that disagreement on such a topic would have led to an incurable rift; yet Amis and Hitchens remained close, and the former ended up delivering the eulogy at the latter’s funeral.