The American essays of renowned writer Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) artistically chronicle the robust urban life of Cincinnati and New Orleans. Hearn is one of the few chroniclers of urban American life in the nineteenth century, and much of this material has not been widely available since the 1950s. Lafcadio Hearn's America collects Hearn's stories of vagabonds, river people, mystics, criminals, and some of the earliest accounts available of black and ethnic urban folklife in America. He was a frequently consulted expert on America during his years in Japan, and these editorials reflect on the problems and possibilities of American life as the country entered its greatest century. Hearn’s work, which reflects an America that is less “melting pot” than a varied, spicy, and often exotic gumbo, provide essential background for the study of America’s first steps away from its agrarian beginnings.
It is this group of papers, of special interest and significance to the student of Hearn, themselves marked by the rich beginnings of his characteristic charm, that have been selected to form the bulk of the present volume. Hearn himself at one time began to prepare for the press a collection of these papers, with the Floridian Reveries as its initial section. Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) was born in Greece, grew up in Ireland, and worked as reporter in the United States before moving to Japan.
The dead wreak revenge on the living, paintings come alive, spectral brides possess mortal men and a priest devours human flesh in these chilling Japanese ghost stories retold by a master of the supernatural. Lafcadio Hearn drew on the phantoms and ghouls of traditional Japanese folklore - including the headless 'rokuro-kubi', the monstrous goblins 'jikininki' or the faceless 'mujina' who stalk lonely neighbourhoods - and infused them with his own memories of his haunted childhood in nineteenth-century Ireland to create these terrifying tales of striking and eerie power. Today they are regarded in Japan as classics in their own right. Edited with an introduction by Paul Murray
Lafcadio Hearn lived an eventful life -- he was born on a Greek island to a British father and a mother of noble Kytheran-Greek lineage; as a small child he was sent home to be raised in Ireland by relatives. As a young man, he went to Ohio, where he found work as a newsman, and eventually wrote morbidly yellow journalism, eventually becoming known for "florid accounts of local murders, developing a reputation as the paper's premier sensational journalist." (Quoth Wikipedia.) He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote of local culture, and his cookbooks are still well-known. He went to the Caribbean, and wrote books on that as well. And then he moved to Japan, and that's where he did the work that everyone remembers, even now. The last fifteen years of his life produced books like "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," "Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan," "Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life," "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East," "The Boy Who Drew Cats," "Exotics and Retrospectives," "Japanese Fairy Tales," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," "Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs," "Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things," "Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation," and "The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies and Stories." "And" he was a teacher at several colleges in Japan while he wrote those. Quite a life. This book contains three stories, "The Legend of L'Ile Derniere," "Out of the Sea's Strength," and "The Shadow of the Tide." Great stuff; we envy you the opportunity to read them for the first time.
A collection of twenty-eight brilliant and strange stories, inspired by Japanese folk tales and written by renowned Western expatriate Lafcadio Hearn Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was one of the nineteenth century’s best-known writers, his name celebrated alongside those of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Hearn was a true prodigy and world traveler. He worked as a reporter in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and the West Indies before heading to Japan in 1890 on a commission from Harper’s. There, he married a Japanese woman from a samurai family, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, and became a Japanese subject. An avid collector of traditional Japanese tales, legends, and myths, Hearn taught literature and wrote his own tales for both Japanese and Western audiences. Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn brings together twenty-eight of Hearn’s strangest and most entertaining stories in one elegant volume. Hearn’s tales span a variety of genres. Many are fantastical ghost stories, such as “The Corpse-Rider,” in which a man foils the attempts of his former wife’s ghost to haunt him. Some are love stories in which the beloved is not what she appears to be: in “The Story of Aoyagi,” a young samurai narrowly escapes the wrath of his lord for marrying without permission, only to discover that his wife is the spirit of a willow tree. Throughout this collection, Hearn’s reverence for Japan shines through, and his stories provide insights into the country’s artistic and cultural heritage. With an introduction by Andrei Codrescu discussing Hearn’s life and work, as well as a foreword by Jack Zipes, Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn provides a unique window into one writer’s multicultural literary journey.
Lafcadio Hearn lived an eventful life -- he was born on a Greek island to a British father and a mother of noble Kytheran-Greek lineage; as a small child he was sent home to be raised in Ireland by relatives. As a young man, he went to Ohio, where he found work as a newsman, and eventually wrote morbidly yellow journalism, eventually becoming known for "florid accounts of local murders, developing a reputation as the paper's premier sensational journalist." (Quoth Wikipedia.) He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote of local culture, and his cookbooks are still well-known. He went to the Caribbean, and wrote books on that as well. And then he moved to Japan, and that's where he did the work that everyone remembers, even now. The last fifteen years of his life produced books like "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan," "Out of the East: Reveries and Studies in New Japan," "Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life," "Gleanings in Buddha-Fields: Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East," "The Boy Who Drew Cats," "Exotics and Retrospectives," "Japanese Fairy Tales," "In Ghostly Japan," "Shadowings," "Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs," "Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things," "Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation," and "The Romance of the Milky Way and Other Studies and Stories." "And" he was a teacher at several colleges in Japan while he wrote those. Quite a life. This book contains three stories, "The Legend of L'Ile Derniere," "Out of the Sea's Strength," and "The Shadow of the Tide." Great stuff; we envy you the opportunity to read them for the first time.
A THOUSAND books have been written about Japan; but among these, - setting aside artistic publications and works of a purely special character, - the really precious volumes will be found to number scarcely a score. This fact is due to the immense difficulty of perceiving and comprehending what underlies the surface of Japanese life. No work fully interpreting that life, - no work picturing Japan within and without, historically and socially, psychologically and ethically, - can be written for at least another fifty years. So vast and intricate the subject that the united labour of a generation of scholars could not exhaust it, and so difficult that the number of scholars willing to devote their time to it must always be small....
Lafcadio Hearn was one of the most extraordinary figures in America literature, a journalist and novelist who became, later in life, a major literary icon in his adopted nation of japan. Some Chinese Ghosts (1887), a stylized retelling of ancient legends, was one of his earliest books, a foreshadowing of his later fascination with Asian themes. This collection of six stories reveals his deep fascination with the “weird beauty” of Chinese folk-tales. Because he himself knew little of the Chinese language, Hearn relied on European Sinologists to help him create his own versions and understand the historical and linguistic allusions. “To such great explorers,” he acknowledged in a preface, “the realm of Cathayan story belongs by right of discovery and conquest; yet the humbler traveller who follows wonderingly after them into the vast and mysterious pleasure-grounds of Chinese fancy may surely be permitted to cull a few of the marvellous flowers there growing.”
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. In this haunting collection, the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore stalk the page. Lafcadio Hearn, a master storyteller, drew on traditional Japanese folklore, infused with memories of his own haunted childhood in Ireland, to create these chilling tales. They are today regarded in Japan as classics in their own right. 'The stories occupy the reverie world our mind projects onto the backs of our eyelids, where the ordinary mingles with the supernatural' - Wall Street Journal
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