A Shameful Life

Galleys/e-galleys to national media outlets, trade publications, audience-focused websites and reviewers, selected booksellers, literary magazines and bloggers, especially those focusing on works in translation, such as Conversational Reading, Literary Saloon, This Space, Three Percent, Translationista, Center for the Art of Translation, Words without Borders, Translator's Home Companion, and more. Galleys/e-galleys also sent to AV Club, Book Forum, Book Riot, Booklist, BookPage, Choice Book Reviews, Foreword, Library Journal, Lithub, Longitude, Midwest Book Review, Panels, Paste, Portland Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi, San Francisco Book Review, SF Chronicle, Shelf Awareness, The Common Magazine, The Guardian, The LA Review of Books, The New York Journal of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and more. Digital galleys on Edelweiss Special outreach for reviews and interviews with the translator to English-language Japanese media including NHK, The Japan Times, The Asahi Shimbun, Japan Today and more. Spcecial outreach to literature publications and journals such as The American Literary Review, Chicago Review, Lit Hub, New York Journal of Books, The Literary Review, World Literature Review, and more. Academic outreach to Japanese studies and Literature departments. Promotion at Association of Asian Studies, ALA (Postcards and other materials) Giveaways through websites focused on key audiences of Japanese literature and translation. Social media marketing with excerpts from the book on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit and target audience focused forums.

A new translation of one of the greatest works of postwar Japanese literature, acutely capturing modern anxiety and alienationOsamu Dazai is one of the most famous--and infamous--writers of 20th-century Japan. A Shameful Life (Ningen shikkaku) is his final published work and has become a bestselling classic for its depiction of the tortured struggle of a young man to survive in a world that he cannot comprehend. Paralleling the life and death of Dazai himself, the delicate weaving of fact and fiction remorselessly documents via journals the life of Yozo, a university student who spends his time in increasing isolation and debauchery. His doomed love affairs, suicide attempts, and constant fear of revealing his true self haunt the pages of the book and reveal a slow descent into madness. This dark tale nevertheless conveys something authentic about the human heart and its inability to find its true bearing.