literalab

“Since preadolescence, Kusama has sourced inspiration from her waking nightmares. She suffers from rijinshou 離人症, which could be literally translated as “separate person symptom” (the first kanji is used in the Japanese words for “to separate” and “divorce”). In English it is usually rendered as depersonalization. Even the hallucinations it spurs in her are picturesque, […]

Writing in the Malay Insider, Erna Mahyuni compares government interference in Russia and Malaysia through the prism of her favorite author Mikhail Bulgakov. Where Putin’s Russia has a new anti-protest law, Malaysia has a peaceful assembly law. And where writers in Stalin’s Soviet Union were pushed towards acceptable themes and subjects to write about, the […]