Yasunari Kawabata

The first Japanese author to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata is a name I had regrettably not heard before today. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his short story "The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket", I purchased his "Palm-Of-The-Hand Stories" - a series of short stories written over the span of his career - and greatly look forward to reading them!

I picked up also the collection of short stories "A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories" by Primo Levi (an Italian writer) and "Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories" by Stuart Dybek - an American author whose excellent article "The Surprising Power of Stories That Are Shorter Than Short Stories" introduced me to both previously named writers. In it, he discusses the dual visuality of haiku in their original form, speaks of poetry in fiction, and wraps up the article with the beautiful finishing lines: "Even though we all write on computers now, I still think of writing as words on paper. And when you write a story or a poem, it just illuminates. Meaning shines through words like light through cut paper, beaming out into the night, and projecting its image onto another person’s heart."