Brian Bergstrom

Also fun bottom, j'espère 😛

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Hanging out #fcf #nsfw

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I demand free rein to champ at the bit

This is now officially coming up! Erika Kobayashi and I will be discussing her work on the anniversary of the 3/11 triple disaster.

And Colorado people, get in touch! I'll be in Boulder March 7-13!

I've never been to Colorado before, so I could use a native informant

Look at that guy! All lit up

Le Stade Olympique looked nice tonight

A beautiful brown dog in a teal diaper is sprawled out on the floor in what would be a seductive pose for a human

Three mammals cuddling

My husband sent me a photo of our beautiful rescue dog sprawled out on the floor and it took me a second to figure out who she reminded me of

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This is the trick to literary translation too! Writing is rewriting; translating is retranslating

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I'm into this pack assembling down here 😛

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mmm vas-y

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Hanging out #fcf #nsfw

Smorgasbord of Spirits: A Review of I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories A review posted in Asymptote on February 25, 2026, by Jay Boss Rubin Layered, sensory passages and plainspoken, original metaphor co-exist in the collection; no one voice drowns out any of the others.

an excerpt of the review: Alternating decisively between foreignization and domestication, heightened registers and slang, Prins’s translation vibrates with poetry and linguisticity. After a man’s marriage becomes polygamous, in hope of siring additional children, we’re told: “It’s a new two-wife life for Mzee Masumbuko.” When a ghost emerges from an ancestor’s grave, “His whole body is covered in long strands of hair, except for his eyes, which glow like traffic lights.” A witch’s cave, full of bats and spiderwebs, is “pitch-black except for the frail moonglow leaking through the cracks.” Similarly rich and textured descriptions can be found in Salomat Vafo’s “The Loose-Haired Women,” translated from the Uzbek by Sabrina Jaszi: “The dense woods rustled as, from the birds’ nests hanging like little turbans from the branches and buzzing in the wind, all kinds of black birds soared out at once, vanishing into the darkness.” In the preceding story, “Jupiter” by Tomoyuki Hoshino, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom, the narrator ponders: “Maybe a life out of joint was like a misbuttoned shirt—the only way to fix it was to go back and undo the original mistake.” Layered, sensory passages and plainspoken, original metaphor co-exist comfortably in the collection; no one voice drowns out any of the others.

A really nice, finely detailed review of I Was Alive Here Once just came out in Asymptote!

Go check it out!

www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2026/02...

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Having been an avid Gawker-ite during its heyday makes me feel very Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All these days

If you want to know why someone would said that anime is a "fundamental part of modern Right Wing culture", you should read my thesis once it becomes a book!! “Of Tentacles and Men: How anime shaped the internet as we know it” 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

One side of my head

The other side of my head

Hair = cut

For the contemporary Japanese lit zealots — a great interview with Brian Bergstrom on liminality, what gets lost (or gained) in translation, and more.

Smorgasbord of Spirits: A Review of I Was Alive Here Once: Ghost Stories A review posted in Asymptote on February 25, 2026, by Jay Boss Rubin Layered, sensory passages and plainspoken, original metaphor co-exist in the collection; no one voice drowns out any of the others.

an excerpt of the review: Alternating decisively between foreignization and domestication, heightened registers and slang, Prins’s translation vibrates with poetry and linguisticity. After a man’s marriage becomes polygamous, in hope of siring additional children, we’re told: “It’s a new two-wife life for Mzee Masumbuko.” When a ghost emerges from an ancestor’s grave, “His whole body is covered in long strands of hair, except for his eyes, which glow like traffic lights.” A witch’s cave, full of bats and spiderwebs, is “pitch-black except for the frail moonglow leaking through the cracks.” Similarly rich and textured descriptions can be found in Salomat Vafo’s “The Loose-Haired Women,” translated from the Uzbek by Sabrina Jaszi: “The dense woods rustled as, from the birds’ nests hanging like little turbans from the branches and buzzing in the wind, all kinds of black birds soared out at once, vanishing into the darkness.” In the preceding story, “Jupiter” by Tomoyuki Hoshino, translated from the Japanese by Brian Bergstrom, the narrator ponders: “Maybe a life out of joint was like a misbuttoned shirt—the only way to fix it was to go back and undo the original mistake.” Layered, sensory passages and plainspoken, original metaphor co-exist comfortably in the collection; no one voice drowns out any of the others.

A really nice, finely detailed review of I Was Alive Here Once just came out in Asymptote!

Go check it out!

www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2026/02...

The perils of letting AI learn about analogies for you

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