Stone Bridge Press is pleased to announce the first publication under our new imprint MONKEY, Hiromi Ito's The Thorn Puller. We are also proud to share that The Thorn Puller is the recipient of the 2020-2021 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation.
By Hiromi Ito
Translated by Jeffrey Angles
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press
Imprint: MONKEY
Release Date: 08/26/2022
No. Pages: 280
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8 inches
Format: Print & Digital
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 9781737625308
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the
absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
Hiromi Ito came to national attention in Japan in the 1980s for her groundbreaking poetry about pregnancy, childbirth, and female sexuality.
After relocating to the U.S. in the 1990s, she began to write about the immigrant experience and biculturalism. In recent years, she has focused on the ways that dying and death shape human experience.
English translations include Killing Kanoko and Wild Grass on the Riverbank.
Jeffrey Angles is a writer and professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the first non-native poet writing in Japanese to win the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a highly coveted prize for poetry. His translation of the modernist classic The Book of the Dead by Shinobu Orikuchi won both the Miyoshi Award and the Scaglione Prize for translation.
The Thorn Puller is the proud recipient of the 2020-2021 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation.
The William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation is an annual competition coordinated by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Sibley was Associate Professor Emeritus in East Asian Languages &Civilizations and a renown scholar and translator of Japanese literature. He is best known for his work, The Shiga Hero, first published in 1979 by the University of Chicago Press, which introduced Western readers to the fiction of Shiga Naoya, one of Japan’s foremost modern writers. In keeping with Sibley’s lifelong devotion to translation and to the place of literature in the classroom, up to $3000 is awarded each year as a publishing subvention for translations of Japanese literature into English.