Contributors to The Literary Review

Patrick Keppel's work has appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review and Tamaqua.

Ilan Stavans is the author of The Hispanic Condition, Bandito, and Growing Up Latino and editor of Tropical Synagogues.

Agustina Bessa-Luis was born in northern Portugal in 1922 and has lived in Oporto since 1950. She has published a long list of distinguished novels, several of which have been adapted for the screen. In recent years she has specialized in biographical novels, and her collections of short-short stories have been particularly admired by critics. Her novels have been translated into French, German, and Italian.

Heberto Helder was born on the island of Madeira in 1930. He spent many years in Africa, having twice crossed the desert, and he also wandered around much of Europe, supporting himself as a journalist or manual laborer. Some of these wanterings are reflected in his unusual stories, which have been translated into French and Italian. Helder is a poet in the first instance, as we can easily gather from his "fiction."

Pepetela, born in southern Angola in 1941, was active in the guerilla movement that fought to overthrow the colonial regime in the 1960s. He served for a time as Minister of Education after Angola became independent, in 1975, and has more recently worked as a sociology professor. He is one of Angola's most read and most translated fiction writers, and he has also authored several plays.

Jos Saramago, born in 1922, discounts his first novel, issued in 1946, after which he published nothing further for twenty years. Then came poetry, short stories, plays and above all novels, and he is today his contry's most translated novelist, with The Stone Raft and Maunal of Painting & Calligraphy being his most recent titles in English. A political journalist before the 1974 Revolution, Saramago continues to be highly active politically.

Junko Kimura is a leading scholar and translator of the works of Anais Nin in Japan. She lives and teaches in Sapporo, in the northernmost main island of Japan.

Ryokan (1758-1831) was a Japanese Zen monk much renowned for his distinctive calligraphy and his poetry in Chinese and Japanese. His poetry centers mainly around his daily activities, with occasional works of a doctrinal nature, and is noted for its simplicity of statement and emotional warmth.

Ihara Saikaku was a poet and writer of popular fiction born into a thriving merchant family in Osaka in 1642.

Miyamoto Teru, born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1947, is a prolific writer of short stories, essays, and novels. In 1977 he received the Dazai Osamu Prize for Doro no kawa (Muddy river) and in 1978 the Akutagawa Prize, the most coveted literary prize for young Japanese writers, for Hotarugawa (Firefly river).

Translators

Anthony Hood Chambers is the distinguished translator of Tanizaki Junichiro, one of the great authors of twentieth century world literature. His is acting chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University.

Robert Lyons Danly is a professor Japanese at the University of Michigan and also teaches at the University of London. His study of the late nineteenth-century writer Higuchi Ichiyo, accompanied by translations of her stories, won the American Book Award prize of literary translation.

Burton Watson is one of the foremost scholars and translators of Japanese literature in the century. He currently resides and works in Niigata, Japan.

Editor's Note on the Portugese Literature

Although Portuguese is more widely spoken throughout the world than French or German, its role as a literary language is far less known. That's unfortunate. The stories here at The Literary Review site reveal a flexibility of its expression and a breadth of material. Most of all, however, these stores affirm the significant of Portuguese fiction for contemporary world literature. A sentence of Herberto Helder captures the essence of many of these works: "In what complex webs an innocence gets tangled?" Complex webs of language, imagery, physical presences, and states of being.