Böcker av Roger Pulvers

Author, playwright, translator, theater and film director Roger Pulvers has translated and adapted one of world theater's greatest comic classics, Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector. This version for two actors, here in print for the first time, has been produced in Japan and Australia to great acclaim. Roger Pulvers writes in his Foreword ... "The Government Inspector for Two Actors is a theatrical challenge to actors and staff, especially costume designer and stage manager. It requires ultra-quick changes. The challenge lies not only in getting the actor into the right costume at the right time, but also for the actors to transform themselves instantaneously from one character to another. But the script was constructed with all this in mind from the beginning. Its premise is that you can be anybody you want to be, so long as you can convince others of it. In that sense The Government Inspector for Two Actors is about the theater itself as much as it is about the true and false faces of our society.""A sharp satire made for today" Yomiuri Shimbun "Genius and hilarity" The Canberra Times "Gogol for two superb" The Australian "For comedy, this is as good as it gets" Canberra City News "A revelation ... the integrity of Gogol's message about corrupt bureaucracy remains alive and well" Brisbane Courier Mail "Satire good as gold" Sun Herald "It's a farce, and a very funny one at that" Sunday Telegraph "Be astounded that this old play can resonate today and that it is hilariously funny" Daily Telegraph "The comedy stakes are raised through Roger Pulvers' terrific adaptation for two actors" Sydney Morning Herald

MIYAZAWA KENJI remains not only Japan's most popular and beloved writer of stories for children and adults but a prescient voice for this century on how we can survive and prevail over the most challenging conditions that we face on this planet. Roger Pulvers writes in his Introduction ..."Kenji's message is: It is easy to exclude others who are 'different' from your circle, but if you exclude others, you exclude yourself, because you are inextricably linked to them; it is easy to be unkind to others, but if you are unkind to others, you are unkind to yourself; it is very easy to kill, but if you kill another person, the person who dies within is yourself.""Destroy nature in any or all of its qualities and we destroy human goodness, compassion and love. No Japanese understood this more profoundly than Miyazawa Kenji, and the people of the world need to know that."In this new collection, acclaimed author, translator and film director Roger Pulvers presents, in masterful translations, some of Miyazawa Kenji's most well-known stories. In "The Boy of the Winds" the wind arrives in a village in the form of a boy, Matasaburo, bringing, with great compassion, a warning over the abuse of nature by humans. In "The Bears on Mt. Nametoko," the fate of the king of the mountains, Kojuro, becomes that of the bears he hunts. And in the exquisitely poignant "Barefeet of Light" two young brothers face the cruelest hardships ... and the message Kenji gives us is always one of devotion and love.In addition, there are stories here by other well-known Japanese authors, the final one being the beautiful tribute to the importance of water in our lives, Inoue Hisashi's "The Water Letters."All translations come with commentary that puts the works in their historical and social context.The Japan Times has written of an earlier anthology of his works translated by Roger Pulvers: "The reader can clearly feel Miyazawa's values and hopes for humanity across time...."

Half of Each Other takes place in Tokyo. It tells the story of Nick and Setsuko York, a once very fond married couple devoted to their adorable five-year-old daughter, Emi.Half of Each Other is the story of a woman and a man challenged by the shock of an overwhelming grief. Both are overcome by an immense sorrow … both are tempted by the passions of an extra-marital affair.We are all half of each other.How these two people, who were once madly in love with each other, overcome their grief and come to terms with the death of their daughter, provides the narrative of this intensely moving, heart-rending and uplifting Irish-Japanese love story.

"Roger has fearlessly thrown himself into the whirlpool of cross-culturalism. His life reads like an adventure story."-Ryuichi SakamotoThe Unmaking of an American is an engaging and entertaining cross-cultural memoir spanning decades of dramatic history on four continents. Author, playwright, translator, journalist, theater and film director Roger Pulvers explores the nature of memory through life connections created from people and places, both past and present.Born into a Jewish American family in New York and raised in Los Angeles, Roger Pulvers journeyed outside the U.S. for the first time in 1964, when he visited the Soviet Union, returning there the following year and heading to Poland in 1966. In 1967, he moved to Japan, forming a tie to that country that has lasted more than half a century. Pulvers became an Australian citizen in 1976 and has chronicled life-political, social and cultural-in those countries in hundreds of articles and essays, as well as works of fiction."No memory, however trivial and banal, is unimportant if it remains with you; no feeling that was once felt cannot be retrieved when you feel the absolute need to access it. And it is our memories that order the chaotic conglomeration of experience and sentiment that make up our selves.""I drifted from the United States to Eastern Europe to Japan and then to Australia. This movement in itself was no different from that of hundreds of millions of people who have migrated from one country to another. The only anomalous feature of my choices is that not many people leave the "land of golden opportunity" for good; not many choose to opt out of their tie to "the home of the free.""You are taking a step. But it is not leading you in a straight line. Each step reminds you that your life is taking a turn, however imperceptible, and each turn represents a moment in the present where the future can be glimpsed simultaneously. What is the direction of these stepping-stones? Where are they leading you? It is impossible to tell. They lead nowhere, and they seem to come back to the place you were before."

Tokyo Performance is set in the pre-internet age, brilliantly captures the zeitgeist of Japan at the time. In this riveting, entertaining and wholly poignant tale, a Japanese celebrity receives a phone call while live on air that will change his life forever.Nori, a high profile Tokyo-based celebrity chef with his own weekly television show, is famous and beloved and he knows it - but he's about to put in his strangest performance.Award-winning writer, playwright and film director, Roger Pulvers, brings his love and deep fascination for Japanese culture to Tokyo Performance, a funny and, at times, tragic story, which explores the cost of fame.Red Circle Minis: Original, Short and Compelling ReadsTokyo Performance is part of Red Circle Minis, a series of short captivating books by Japan's finest contemporary writers that brings the narratives and voices of Japan together as never before. Each book is a first edition written specifically for the series and is being published in English first.

This fascinating fictional account of the life and times of Lafcadio Hearn probes the question: "What was the nature of this man, born wanderer, informant of the fiendish details of Japanese lore... a man who chose to live his life 'in defiance of the season'?" Though now largely forgotten in the West, he is, in the 21st century, still considered by the Japanese to be the foreigner with the most insight into their mind and mores. Orphan of Europe, chronicler of the eerie and the grotesque, journalist and ethnographer of subcultures, Greek-Irish author Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Yokohama from the United States in 1890. During his 14-year stay in Japan he wrote 14 books about the country, becoming known, in the decades succeeding his death, as the foremost interpreter of things Japanese in the West. The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn is a novel not only about Hearn in Meiji Japan but about any person in any era who may feel, for a time or forever, more at home in a foreign land than in their own. The novel is preceded by a detailed introduction on Hearn from the time of his birth in Greece in 1850 until his death in Japan in 1904.

Liv Grimstad is riding on a suburban train in Sydney, Australia in 1975 when she takes notice of the old man sitting opposite her. Though his features are different, she recognizes that man by the piercing look in his cornflower-blue eyes.She is convinced it is Donald Meissner, the man who has haunted her memory since they both worked at the German Embassy in Tokyo during the war. He was the beast who tormented and persecuted people, sending them into the hands of the Japanese Military Police. She does not confront him at first but rather sets out on a journey of detective work to uncover this man.LIV is a personal detective story and thrilling historical mystery set in Australia in 1975 and Tokyo in 1945. But it tells a universal tale about how the past bears on our present and future. LIV is a gripping mystery, of a present haunted by the past, but also a profoundly moral book, asking of the reader: what would you do? In this, LIV deserves comparison with novels as great as An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero