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Kathryn Harrison on Kobo Abe

Kobo Abe (1924-1973) was a giant of post-war Japanese literature, whose novels and plays captured the alienation and loss of identity his society wrestled with after their defeat. Abe’s personal history sensitized him to these dynamics. While he was young, his father took the family to Manchuria, in northern China, where he practiced medicine. Japan soon invaded and then brutally occupied the province, developing Abe’s lifelong ambivalence with his nation.



After the war, he explored the profound sense of confusion and loss in Japan’s growing urban centers through deeply imagined absurdist works that are often described as Kafakaesque. His major works include:

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The Book: The Top Ten

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Featured List

Kathryn Harrison on Kobo Abe

Kobo Abe (1924-1973) was a giant of post-war Japanese literature, whose novels and plays captured the alienation and loss of identity his society wrestled with after their defeat. Abe’s personal history sensitized him to these dynamics. While he was young, his father took the family to Manchuria, in northern China, where he practiced medicine. Japan soon invaded and then brutally occupied the province, developing Abe’s lifelong ambivalence with his nation.



After the war, he explored the profound sense of confusion and loss in Japan’s growing urban centers through deeply imagined absurdist works that are often described as Kafakaesque. His major works include:

Read More

The Book: The Top Ten

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New List

Mary Gaitskill

1. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922).
2. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955).
3. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962).
4. Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853).
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857).
6. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927).
7. Gusev by Anton Chekhov (1860–1904).
8. Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie (1904).
9. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842).
10. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (1831).

 

 

 

Classic List

Lev Grossman

1. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857).
2. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925).
3. Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (1993).
4. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922).
5. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925).
6. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (1950-56).
7. The Once and Future King by T.H. White (1958).
8. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945).
9. Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer (1381).
10. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842).