New adventures in posthuman sci-fi from the author of I'm Waiting for You

Longlisted for National Book Award in Translated Literature, 2021

Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim's most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim's literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today.

Bo-Young Kim (born 1975) won the inaugural Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Award with her first published novella in 2004 and has gone on to win the annual South Korean SF Novel Award three times. In addition to writing, she regularly serves as a lecturer, juror and editor of sci-fi anthologies, and served as a consultant to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho's earlier sci-fi film Snowpiercer. She has novellas forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2021. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea, with her family.

Playful and celebratory, yet also mourning the loss of language, this poetry anthology revives the fading tradition of Caribbean Hindustani songs

In a new groundbreaking anthology, award-winning poet, memoirist and translator Rajiv Mohabir (born 1981) engages with Indo-Caribbean language and culture, this time by inviting 17 diasporic writers to experiment with their own personal interpretations of two famous Chutney songs. Chutney music is a syncretic, Caribbean music born out of North Indian tunes and African beats. Caribbean Hindustani songs and poems, the basis for Chutney music, are no longer spoken with the frequency that they were two generations ago. To this end, Mohabir asked some of the most exciting Caribbean writers and poets working today to translate two popular Chutney songs. A Caribbean diasporic response in the manner of Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, this book expands on the idea of that translation classic with reimaginings, reinterpretations and compelling treatises on Chutney music. I Will Not Go collects poetry inherited by the descendants of indenture and, through its innovative reimagining, celebrates the poetry of survival.
Contributors include: Anita Baksh, Divya Persaud, Eddie Bruce-Jones, Miranda Rachel Deebrah, Will Depoo, Anu Lakhan, Simone Devi Jhingoor, Natasha Ramoutar and more.

Introducing English readers to the speculative fiction of pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings and interventions into internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea

The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea's most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities.
Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djuna's stories together form a brilliantly intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was.
Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna, who first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s, has steadfastly refused to confirm any personal details regarding age, gender or legal name, or even whether they are one person or multiple. Djuna is widely considered one of the most prolific and important writers in South Korean science fiction. They have published nine short story collections, three novels, and numerous essays and uncollected stories.

The U.S. debut of internationally acclaimed poet and performance artist Shailja Patel, Migritude is a tour-de-force hybrid text that confounds categories and conventions. Part poetic memoir, part political history, Migritude weaves together family history, reportage and monologues to create an achingly beautiful portrait of women's lives and migrant journeys undertaken under the boot print of Empire. Patel, who was born in Kenya and educated in England and the U.S., honed her poetic skills in performances of this work that have received standing ovations throughout Europe, Africa and North America. She has been described by the Gulf Times as the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy and by CNN as the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange. Migritude includes interviews with the author, as well as performance notes and essays.

A bestseller in New Zealand and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize, Sia Figiel's debut marks the first time a novel by a Samoan woman has been published in the United States. Figiel uses the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su'ifefiloi to talk back to Western anthropological studies of Samoan women and culture. Told in a series of linked episodes, this powerful and highly original narrative follows 13-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village and comes to terms with her own search for identity.
A story of Samoan puberty blues, in which Gauguin is dead but Elvis lives on. -Vogue Australia
A storytelling triumph. -Elle Australia

Illuminated by pop fantasies, Donna Summer disco tracks and teen passion, the fiercely earnest characters in Rolling the R's come to life against a background of burning dreams and neglect in a small 1970s Hawaiian community. In his daring first novel, R. Zamora Linmark treats the music of the Bee Gees and schoolyard bullying as equally formative experiences in the lives of a group of Filipino fourth-graders living in Kalihi, Honolulu, who call themselves the Farrah Fawcett Fan Club. The characters' stories unfold largely in the documentary detritus of their lives--their poems and prayers, book reports and teacher evaluations--all written in carefully observed, pitch-perfect vernacular. Now back in stock, Linmark's tour-de-force experiments in narrative structure, pidgin and perspective roll every are, throwing new light on gay identity and the trauma of cultural assimilation. Rolling the R's goes beyond coming of age and coming out to address the realities of cultural confusion, prejudice and spiraling levels of desire in humorous yet haunting portrayals that are, as Matthew Stadler writes, stylish, shameless and beautiful. This special twentieth anniversary edition includes a new essay by the author, introducing one of the most original and iconic stories of the Asian diasporic experience and an essential work of fiction in the Asian American literary canon.
R. Zamora Linmark (born 1968) is a writer and poet currently based in Honolulu and Manila. He has published three poetry collections, two novels and adapted Rolling the R's for the stage in 2008.

Gravestones hatch political critiques and tomatoes resist being eaten in the wildly surreal and funny stories of Genpei Akasagawa, a giant of the Japanese avant-garde

There is a small but potent club of authors--Miranda July and Patti Smith are both members--who were renowned artists long before they became writers. Genpei Akasagawa was already a giant of the Japanese contemporary art world when he began writing these stories, which earned him Japan's two most prestigious book awards.

In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism. After reading I Guess All We Have Is Freedom, you will never be able to look at a sliding door, a rubber band or a plastic gutter the same way again. In spite of their suburban settings, the stories here are more radical than the most cosmopolitan contemporary art. Or as the protagonist puts it: The whole art thing is a little played out at this point. Nowadays, it's all about buying gutters. Going out to buy a gutter on a sunny day.

Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) was a rare phenomenon, an artist who successfully transitioned from the avant-garde to the larger realm of popular culture. Akasegawa emerged on the Japanese art scene around 1960, starting in the radical Anti-Art movement and becoming a member of the seminal artist collectives Neo Dada and Hi Red Center. The epic piece Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident (1963-74), which involved a real-life police investigation and trial, cemented his place as an inspired conceptualist. Hyperart: Thomasson (Kaya Press, 2010), a collection of musings on art that the city itself makes, marks a crucial turning point in his metamorphosis from subculture to pop-culture status. Also an accomplished author writing under the penname Katsuhiko Otsuji, in 1981 he won Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, for his story Dad's Gone, translated into English here for the first time in this volume.

Named one of 5 Writers Under 35 by National Book Foundation, 2019

Blending elements of memoir and sports writing, Anelise Chen's debut novel is an experimental work that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hyponemata, or notes to the self, in the form of observations, reminders and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on how to live--or perhaps more urgently why to live, a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing world of sports, the novel questions the validity of our current narratives of success.

Anelise Chen earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Gawker, NPR and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

An intimate telling of the life and times of teenage Korean revolutionary Kim San

First published in 1941 and long unavailable, Song of Arirang tells the true story of Korean revolutionary Kim San (Jang Jirak), who left colonized Korea as a teenager to fight against Japanese imperialism and fought alongside Mao's Red Army during the Chinese Revolution. This remarkably intimate memoir (as told to the American journalist Nym Wales, aka Helen Foster Snow) brings to vivid life some of the most dramatic events of the period.

With its first-hand account of early 20th-century guerilla insurgency and radical cross-pollination, this rare, behind-the-scenes look into what Wales describes as the psyche of a dedicated and thoughtful revolutionary gives voice to the brutality, betrayal and alliances that rocked East Asia at the beginning of the last century and continue to shape the region--and the world--today. Kaya's edition of Song of Arirang includes the writings (both literary and in essay form) of Kim San himself, translated into English for the first time ever, as well as contextualizing notes by George Totten and an introduction by Arif Dirlik.

Kim San (Jang Jirak, 1905-37) left his family in Korea as a teenager and crossed the border into China, where he joined Mao's Red Army. A participant in or witness to some of the most critical events of the Chinese Revolution, he became a leader in the fight against Japanese colonial rule, and was executed in China in 1937. He was awarded a posthumous Patriot award by the South Korean government in 2005.

Born in Cedar City, Utah, Helen Foster Snow (1907-97) moved to China in 1931 and reported extensively on the Chinese Revolution, the Korean independence movement and the Sino-Japanese War. Writing under the pseudonym of Nym Wales, she wrote and published over 40 books, including Inside Red China, My China Years: A Memoir and Song of Ariran. In 1993, she was awarded the first China Writer's Association award, and in 1996, she became the first American ever to be honored as a Friendship Ambassador by the Chinese government.

A memoir about the lingering racial trauma of America's concentration camps, from the author of Fox Drum Bebop

Can one wreak vengeance against oneself? This anguished question hangs over Gene Oishi's powerful memoir about his lifelong struggle to claim both his Japanese and American identities in the aftermath of World War II, when he and more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in America's concentration camps. From the moment he and everyone like him on the West Coast is deemed a threat to national security by President Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, Oishi finds himself trying to distance himself from his Japanese heritage even as he questions whether he will ever truly be accepted as fully American. Throughout his return to California as a teenager, his postwar service in the US Army and his subsequent career in journalism and politics, the deep wounds caused by the trauma of incarceration continue to fester. In Search of Hiroshi, originally published in 1988 and long unavailable, is republished in a new edition in commemoration of the 80th anniversary of EO 9066.
Gene Oishi (born 1933), former Washington and foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, has written articles on the Japanese American experience for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post and Newsweek. His novel Fox Drum Bebop was published in 2014 and won the Asian American Studies Association Book Prize in 2016. Now retired, he lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

The first volume in Kaya's series examining the work of a new wave of Asian filmmakers who are reshaping contemporary cinema

Called the world's most original action auteur by the Village Voice, Takeshi Kitano is already legendary in Japan, where he is known both for his inventive films and for his legendarily caustic alter ego, comedian Beat Takeshi. In the United States, his stylishly noir aesthetic has both influenced and been admired by such directors as Martin Scorcese and Quentin Tarantino. His emotionally intense yet lyrical films have won him worldwide acclaim and honors, including the Grand Prix for Hanabi [Fireworks] at the Venice Film Festival. Now, the long-awaited Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano offers a collection of essays on the internationally acclaimed film director by Casio Abe. Despite his impact on contemporary cinema, very little critical work on Kitano's films exists in the United States. Abe's book, originally published in Japan, combines a detailed look at Kitano's filmography with an incisive critique of the consumerist culture which Kitano's films play against. It is also purportedly Kitano's favorite book on his own work. This translation of Abe's writings on Kitano has been updated with articles that discuss Kitano's most recent releases, up to and including Dolls (2002), as well as extensive appendices and footnotes. Abe is one of Japan's preeminent cultural critics, and his book gives a rare and insightful look into the workings of one of the largest media cultures in the world. This will be the first book devoted exclusively to Kitano's work to be published in the United States. Beat Takeshi vs. Takeshi Kitano is the first volume in Kaya's Wicked Radiance series, which examines the work of a new wave of Asian filmmakers who are reshaping contemporary cinema.

Spanning more than a half-century of South Korean sci-fi, this massive anthology documents a unique convergence of culture and genre

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction presents the first book-length English-language translation of science and speculative fiction from South Korea, bringing together 13 classic and contemporary stories from the 1960s through the 2010s. From the reimagining of an Asimovian robot inside the walls of a Buddhist temple and a postapocalyptic showdown between South and North Korean refugees on a faraway planet to a fictional recollection of a disabled woman's struggle to join an international space mission, these stories showcase the thematic and stylistic versatility of South Korean science-fiction writers in its wide array. At once conversant with the global science-fiction tradition and thick with local historical specificities, their works resonate with other popular cultural products of South Korea--from K-pop and K-drama to videogames, which owe part of their appeal to their pulsating technocultural edge and their ability to play off familiar tropes in unexpected ways.

Coming from a country renowned for its hi-tech industry and ultraspeed broadband yet mired in the unfinished Cold War, South Korean science fiction offers us fresh perspectives on global technoindustrial modernity and its human consequences. The book also features a critical introduction, an essay on SF fandom in South Korea, and contextualizing information and annotations for each story.

Authors include Geo-il Bok, In-Hun Choi, Djuna, Soyeon Jeong, Bo-Young Kim, Changgyu Kim, Jung-hyuk Kim, Young-ha Kim, Taewoon Lim, Yunseong Mun, Seonghwan Park, Min-gyu Pak, I-Hyeong Yun, Seonghwan Park, Mingyu Pak and I-Hyeong Yun.

Winner of the 2020 PEN America Literary Award for Debut Short Story Collection, Mimi Lok's Last of Her Name narrates the interconnected lives of diasporic women from '80s UK suburbia to WWII Hong Kong and contemporary California

Mimi Lok's Last of Her Name is an eye-opening story collection about the intimate, interconnected lives of diasporic women and the histories they are born into. Set in a wide range of time periods and locales, including '80s UK suburbia, WWII Hong Kong and contemporary urban California, the book features an eclectic cast of outsiders: among them, an elderly housebreaker, wounded lovers and kung-fu fighting teenage girls. Last of Her Name offers a meditation on female desire and resilience, family and the nature of memory.

A coming-of-age tale of dislocation and inherited trauma from the acclaimed young French Vietnamese novelist

French Vietnamese writer Line Papin's stunning English-language debut, The Girl Before Her offers a window onto the existential anguish of displacement as experienced by a child on the cusp of becoming a woman. Uprooted without explanation from the sunshine and chaos of Hà Nội at the age of ten, the narrator finds herself adrift in the unfamiliar, gray world of France and grappling with a deep sense of uncertainty about who she is and where she belongs. Lacking the words to express her growing sense of alienation, she stops talking, then eating. She is hospitalized and almost dies from anorexia. Part meditation, part family history, part message in a bottle to her younger selves, Papin's lyrical work of autofiction explores what it takes to embrace one's multiracial, transnational self by making peace with the generations of women who've come before. The Girl Before Her is the first book to be published by Ink & Blood, a new joint imprint from Kaya Press and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN), which aims to bring Vietnamese literary voices from across the globe to English readers.

More mind-bending speculative fiction by one of South Korea's most provocative science fiction writers

Following the landmark English-language publication of Everything Good Dies Here, Kaya Press delivers more provocative thought experiments by pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings on internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea. Not Yet Gods explores the universe-shattering effects of teenage anger cross-pollinated with radiation-induced psychic powers, unscrupulous governments and corporate avarice.
In the aftermath of a nuclear explosion set off in North Korea, an ordinary South Korean high school classroom becomes ground zero for the discovery of a radical new source of energy: children capable of conducting and amplifying the telepathic and telekinetic powers of those around them. Told as a series of interlinked stories, Djuna's fractally unfolding thought experiments interrogate the nature of power, disability and illusion in the potential end of history.
Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s. They have published nine short story collections, three novels and numerous essays and uncollected stories.

Akasegawa is the kind of artist who inspires everybody every time he makes a new piece of art. -Yoko Ono

In the 1970s, estranged from the institutions and practices of high art, avant-garde artist and award-winning novelist Genpei Akasegawa (1937-2014) launched an open-ended, participatory project to search the streets of Japan for strange objects which he and his collaborators labeled hyperart, codifying them with an elaborate system of humorous nomenclature.
Along with modernologists such as the Japanese urban anthropologist Kon Wajiro and his European contemporary, Walter Benjamin, Akasegawa is part of a lineage of modern wanderers of the cityscape. His work, which has captured the imagination of Japan, reads like a comic forerunner of the somber mixed-media writings of W.G. Sebald, and will appeal to all fans of modern literature, art, artistic/social movements and writing that combines visual images and text in the exploration of urban life.
In this revised edition, Matthew Fargo's original US translation of Akasegawa's hilarious, brilliantly conceived exercise in collective observation is accompanied by reflections from noted scholars Jordan Sand and Reiko Tomii, as well as a new essay by Akasegawa scholar William Marotti and a reflection on Akasegawa's legacy as a teacher by writer, artist and composer Masayuki Qusumi, a former student of Akasegawa's.

A new book-length elegy from San Diego's 2023-24 Poet Laureate

Jason Magabo Perez's second full-length book of poetry is an extended elegy set in the alleyways and Pacific-bound boulevards of San Diego, California during the current global health crisis. Called an antidote to despair (Muriel Leung, Imagine Us, The Swarm) and poetry that complicates notions of solidarity, community and justice, distilling the quotidian into something sacred (Rachelle Cruz, God's Will For Monsters), I ask about what falls away serves as an intimate grief manifesto against the daily violations of racial capitalism. Perez, the 2023-2024 San Diego Poet Laureate, employs a critical and improvisatory assemblage of lyric and litany, narrative and distillation, fragment and refrain to map city, solidarity and history. At once playful and tenacious, I ask about what falls away pays careful witness to working-class uncles, aunties, cousins and youth in rhythm with the anti-colonial wisdom of writers such as Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Aimé Césaire, remixing sorrow with a deep love and knowledge for everyday people.

It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.

Jenny Liou's debut poetry collection conjoins the world of cage fighting and the traumas of immigration

In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter's cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history. Liou writes with spare, stunning lyricism about how cage fighting offered relief from the trauma inflicted by diaspora's vanishing ghosts; how, in the cage, an elbow splits an eyebrow, or an armbar snaps a limb, and, even when you lose a fight, you've won something: pain. Liou places the physical manifestation of violence in her sport alongside the deeper traumas of immigration and her own complicated search for identity, exploring what she inherited from her Chinese immigrant father--who was also obsessed with poetry and martial arts. When she finally steps away from the cage to raise children of her own, Liou begins to question how violence and history pass from one generation to the next, and whether healing is possible without forgetting.
Jenny Liou (born 1983) is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter. She lives and writes in Covington, Washington.

Poetry. Fiction. Asian American Studies. Literary criticism. This republication of Villa's writings both recovers and rediscovers the work of this fierce iconoclast for a new generation. Oscar V. Campomanes of the University of California writes, To say of Jose Garcia Villa that he made English 'strange' to native English speakers -- as Jean Paul Sarte once said about Frantz Fanon and French -- is no extravagant claim ... Villa hungrily embraced colonial culture even as, like Fanon, Villa sought to transform its impositions into highly novel, even unrecognizable, verbal artifacts and art forms. This volume is bound to dramatically recast our considerations of American modenism, Asian and Filipino American literary history, and the rise of 'englishes' in colonial and postcolonial studies. Anyone interested in the least-understood cultural underside of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines or in the colonial aspect of American cultural assimilationism would do well to read and enjoy this book. I hail it as a major