Snow Country is the story of a love affair between Shimamura, a wealthy idler from Tokyo, and Komako, a geisha. Komako entertains at an isolated resort at a hot spring in the snowy mountains on the west coast of Japan. Shimamura is a husband and a father who visits this resort often to escape from his life in Tokyo. On one of his train journeys to snow country, he meets an enigmatic woman named Yoko who wreaks havoc in his world.
Both novellas are deeply imbued with the cultures and myths of Japan and have slow paced simple storylines filled with lovely moments while exploring the theme of human loneliness. Kawabata’s short and clean sentences are like haiku with vivid imagery. Much is left unsaid. Most of his writing is about the beauty and sorrow of the impermanence of things. Both books are in the Coffman collection and can be found in the Fiction section shelved under Kawabata.
Exploring these books is easy. For borrowers, nothing changes about the checkout or return procedures. All you need to do is add this set of shelves to your browsing habit…and open your mind to other timelines, other worlds and other beings.
We expect the Spotlight to rotate every three or four months. So once science fiction disappears back into the regular collection, there’ll be another theme to take its place. Right now the second Spotlight is a mystery; it could be stories “with ghost narrators” or “set in Minnesota” or “reminiscent of Jane Austen.” Or maybe something completely different… Coming soon online, the Spotlight list with links to each book’s entry in our online catalog!
hidden from the public. He was married with a wife and a daughter in England.
Despite Lesley’s initial apprehension of his extended stay at her home, Maugham soon becomes one of her trusted friends. She reveals to him previously unshared details of a murder trial of an Englishwoman, who was a close friend of Lesley. Maugham continues to probe, and Lesley divulges secrets from her own marriage and life. Out of this visit to Penang came Maugham’s collection of short stories, The Casuarina Tree. Maugham used real characters in his stories and often didn’t disguise them. Tan Twan Eng borrows details from Maugham’s stories and skillfully combines real events with imagined ones to create a mesmerizing masterpiece, in effect doing what Maugham did when he used people’s real stories to create his fiction. It is an elegant story of a story. The writing is beautiful, bold and authentic. The House of Doors is in the Coffman collection and can be found in the Fiction section shelved under Tan. |
