UCIS Central Calendar

Pittsburgh is excited to be part of the launch of the latest volume of Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan. Now in its seventh year, Monkey Business specializes in high-quality translations from Japanese into English and always includes a few contributions from American writers. The journal’s founder is Motoyuki Shibata, a Tokyo University professor and prolific author and translator in his own right; he is arguably the best-known translator in Japan of American literature (Paul Auster, Kelly Link, Thomas Pynchon and others). Ted Goossen, the other founding editor, is a professor of Japanese literature and film at York University in Toronto. Dr. Goossen is the editor of The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories and a translator of contemporary Japanese literature, most notably the recent story collection by Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women, published by Knopf, 2017). The two will be accompanied by Japanese authors Aoko Matsuda, who has published four collections of short stories in Japan and whose work has appeared in Granta, and Satoshi Kitamura, a well-known author of graphic fiction and children’s books. Ms. Matsuda is also the translator for the American author Karen Russell; she has translated Russell’s St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Anyone interested in translation studies or contemporary literature is invited to attend.