A new collection from the cult author of Terminal Boredom
Izumi Suzuki (1949–1986) was a countercultural icon and a pioneer of Japanese science fiction. She worked as a keypunch operator before finding fame as a model and actress, but it was her writing that secured her reputation. She took her own life at the age of thirty-six.
Fascinatingly skewy
*Daily Telegraph*
This collection showcases [Suzuki's] unique sensibility, which
combined a punk aesthetic with a taste for the absurd. Her
work-populated by misfits, loners, and femmes fatales alongside
extraterrestrial boyfriends, intergalactic animal traffickers, and
murderous teen-agers with E.S.P.-wryly blurs the boundary between
earthly delinquency and otherworldly phenomena.
*The New Yorker*
The work and messages of Ursula K. Le Guin, the author's
longer-lived contemporary, come to mind. Both Suzuki and Le Guin
knew that gender roles are a matter of costume or control, affect
or affliction. The terms we use to define humanity are often
inhuman
*New York Times*
Brilliant and often bleak . all shot through with a camp ethos,
dark humour and kitchen-sink realism . in their brio and jagged
urgency, these stories have, if anything, only gained in their
alarming immediacy.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Not only still relevant but remarkably fresh ... All these stories
are brilliant
*Guardian*
With this impressive collection, translators Bett, David Boyd,
Helen O'Horan, and Daniel Joseph bring 11 strange, transfixing, and
compassionate short stories from Suzuki to English-speaking
audiences. SFF fans are sure to be pleased with these slangy,
accessible new translations of a master.
*Publishers Weekly*
Her punky irreverence remains radiant'
*Frieze*
These strangely prescient stories are perfect for fans of Haruki
Murakami, George Saunders, and Philip K. Dick
*Publishers Weekly*
Extraordinary. To use one of her own coolly illuminating
formulations, Suzuki is steward of a new anxiety
*China Miéville*
[A] riveting book of short stories by cult favorite Japanese sci-fi
author Izumi Suzuki.
*Nylon*
A little speculative, a little punk, a little chaotic-all singular
in their voice and vision. In this new collection, there will be
cheating husbands, score settling, alternate timelines, bored
teens, and space pirates...What a thrill it is to see that more of
her stories are coming down the pipes.
*Lit Hub*
Even decades after her death, Suzuki's sci-fi fantasy worlds feel
fresh. The 11 stories in this deeply unsettling and imaginative
collection are sure to enthrall, disturb and entertain...A
brilliant follow up.
*Tokyo Weekender,*
Sure to be wonderfully off-kilter and imaginative.
*Japan Times*
This volume is at the top of my TBR list.
*Ms. Magazine*
This collection reaches out from the past not as a warning so much
as the musings of a writer grasping for hope in a dark world. Music
is woven through the book, as if Suzuki had created an accompanying
playlist and is urging readers to listen along...These 11 stories
surprise with wry humor and stun with the loneliness of living.
*Kirkus Reviews*
[Suzuki] has produced stories that delight in weaving the uncanny
into everyday experiences. The stories are edgy and comic, taking a
sharp, sardonic scalpel to male privilege in Japanese society ... a
singular voice in Japanese literature
*Irish Times*
Through stories of murderous aliens, rock-and-roll has-beens and
failed witches, Suzuki knows very well that life on Earth sucks,
but that doesn't stop her from constantly imagining and reimagining
radical alterities.
*ArtReview Asia*
Suzuki creates worlds subtly unstuck from specific times and
locations ... The anxiety at the heart of her writing resonates far
beyond its temporal walls. Suzuki's science fiction of the 1980s
has an eerie accordance with the world as we know it today.
*Tokyo Weekender*
Suzuki's work is richly steeped in science fiction, fantasy, and
'70s counterculture...throughout [she] empathizes with those who
feel alien, other, or ostracized-especially women and girls
battling patriarchy and misogyny.
*TIME*
The continuing translation of Suzuki's work is extremely exciting,
as it helps to provide a more thorough picture of a dynamic and
experimental artist whose work parallels some of the most important
work of the 1970s new wave, cyberpunk, and beyond.
*Booklist, Starred Review*
Sardonic, dystopian commentaries on the struggle to stay sane in a
world that often fails to offer encouragement to do so.
*The Prisma*
This new collection brings the same gritty, surreal vibes we
love.
*Book Culture*
These stories are deeply, persistently, wonderfully odd, full of
humor, irony, heartache, and aliens.
*The Philadelphia Inquirer*
Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories ... present
emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar
and fantastical ... Suzuki's voice is boldly abrasive.
*Asymptote Journal*
Reader, beware: Suzuki's stories are soft, but they are not
light.
*The Fabulist*
Blurring together magic, fantasy, and sci-fi, [Suzuki's] stories
bend reality to explore themes of marriage, friendship, love,
sexuality, and femininity.
*The Millions*
Wild and restless ... I can't think of anyone I'd rather read this
spring than this countercultural icon of the Japanese literary
underground.
*Frieze*
A forerunner of cyberpunk ... With dark humour and cool affect,
[Suzuki] presented the isolation of Japanese domestic life.
*Telegraph*
An enjoyably acidic and darkly funny set of stories in which the
novelty is not always so much in the ideas as in the consistently
engaging execution. Suzuki's distinctly misanthropic voice enlivens
these narratives of women whose mundane lives are altered -
sometimes humorously, sometimes catastrophically - by
science-fictional or supernatural occurrences.
*The Washington Post*
Translated into English decades after her death, the sci-fi stories
of Izumi Suzuki gently twist modern Japan into tales of unspeakable
loneliness.
*Spike Art Magazine*
Impressively uncanny stuff.
*Words Without Borders*
[Hit Parade of Tears] challenges the concepts of fantasy and
science fiction, twisting these genres into new and strange things.
These tales are bleak, funny, feminist, angry, and often deeply
allegorical and political.
*Books & Bao*
Hit Parade of Tears perfectly demonstrates Suzuki's sharp social
satire, her singular voice, and her unique aesthetics ...
mesmerising feminist explorations of gender, alienation and
treacherous states of reality that could not have been written by
anyone else
*Fantasy Hive*
Suzuki's acidic voice permeates these 11 hazy, imaginative stories
following women whose lives are altered by time travel, aliens,
magic and more.
*The New York Times Book Review*
A collection of stories that sway between science fiction, fantasy
and the intrigue of modern relationships. Expect a wild ride
through affairs, space pirates and discoveries of new
dimensions.
*Stylist*
It's rare for a short story collection to captivate and glue your
eyes to the page like a thriller. But Hit Parade of Tears ... does
just that, lining up one twisted mindbender after another ... her
plots beguile as they come apart and pull together like pieces of a
deliberately imperfect puzzle.
*Japan Times*
This newly translated collection of Izumi Suzuki's short stories,
first published more than forty years ago, is jaunty, odd, violent,
femme-centric, funny-but what strikes me most is its
freshness."
*LIBER*
[Hit Parade of Tears] has the could-it-be-prescience that renders
good science fiction both captivating and uncanny. At the same
time, it often feels so rooted in the '60s and '70s that it could
have emerged from a time capsule..its prose is strong and clear, a
message from the past that has, thanks to her stellar team of
translators, arrived here asking to be heard.
*NPR*
Two years ago, Izumi Suzuki's work was published in English for the
first time in the collection Terminal Boredom. This second
collection gives English language readers even more of her
inventive and atmospheric stories that explore life on the
outskirts using science fiction and fantasy elements.
*Book Riot*
Suzuki's narratives might contain B-movie silliness. They also have
the hypnotic power of a bender. Just look at the time - you've
suddenly finished them all.
*The New York Times Book Review*
A unique voice in science fiction ... Suzuki's stories represent
female rage at a society which refused to include her ... darkly
witty
*Mslexia*
Packed with casual, occasional sadism ... Each story is air-locked
away from the noisy links between organism and ecosystem, consumer
supply chain and perpetual war ... Dreams of estrangement play out
across a total lack of world.
*The White Review*
[Suzuki's] characters' clever means of dealing with society give
life to each story even half a century after their original
publication. It is not so much the specifics of the worlds Suzuki
creates as the way her characters find relief within them that
makes Hit Parade of Tears translate well for a contemporary
audience.
*The Harvard Review*
[Hit Parade of Tears] speaks to our anxieties and fears about a
world, a future, slowly slipping from our grasp
*Locus Magazine*
This posthumous collection of stories is absurd, with little to do
with the laws of physics: Suzuki takes common sci-fi and fantasy
tropes - themselves a skewer on reality - and twists them further
so that what you're left with is time- and space-bending plotlines
and very strange characters.
*Harper's Bazaar*
Both humorous and devastating ... [Suzuki's] signature sci-fi style
is as moving as it is unpredictable and a must-read by anyone
interested in the emotional politics of our potential
future(s).
*Lucy Writers Platform*
Suzuki is a master at mixing high sci-fi concepts with
melodrama.
*Maudlin House*
Ominous and funny ... Suzuki's "sci-fi surreal" explores reality in
the same way that surrealism did and still does in its contemporary
manifestations, and critiques society as all good sci-fi does.
*Firmament Magazine*
Izumi takes her insincerity to depths unimaginable, from where it
floats up as alien, tampered, and wholly disorienting.
*The Daily Star (Bangladesh)*
I am obsessed by Izumi Suzuki's short stories. Written from the
1970s until her untimely death in 1986, her stories and prose still
feel like they are from the future. She used science-fiction to
speak about gender relations and human and non-human dynamics, but
in the most sparse, mesmerising and melancholic ways.
*The Art Newspaper*
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