Fifty Sounds

Fifty SoundsWhy Japan? In Fifty Sounds, winner of the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, Polly Barton attempts to exhaust her obsession with the country she moved to at the age of 21, before eventually becoming a literary translator. From 'min min', the sound of air screaming, to 'jin jin', the sound of being touched for the very first time, from 'hi'sori', the sound of harbouring masochist tendencies, to 'mote mote', the sound of becoming a small town movie

'The political theorist who wrote about the Nazis and the 'banality of evil' has become a surprise bestseller' Guardian

The baby will feed

'what is history

Tokens may offer a flexible even subversive route to compensation

from unbridled passion to rawest grief

rarely asking what anchors it or what it does to us

menus and other ephemera from as far back as the 17th century to unearth fascinating evidence of the stickiness of the seven-day cycle

and the ethos that animates his creative commitment to architecture and to life itself

whose freedom are we – should we be – thinking about

Hidden beneath the rhetoric of the oppressed and symbolism of the downtrodden lies and the inconvenient fact that those are doing the organizing

Islam emerged amid flourishing Christian and Jewish cultures

and with little economic security and few public amenities