Redacted

“Redacted is a major work of original scholarship and a signal critical accomplishment. With impressive daring and persistence, Jonathan Abel has investigated rarely used archives to open a body of materials virtually unknown to English-language readers. This is a stunning achievement, and it is sure to change the landscape of Japanese literary studies.” - Marilyn Ivy, author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan “A masterful blending of incisive, close textual analysis, subtle situating of literary texts in their historical moments, attention to the very materiality of book culture, Redacted is a truly original thinking about how literature is formed and malformed, written, received, and read, under the pressure of censorship. It does nothing less than reveal a complex but hidden history of modern Japanese literature. A thrilling example of literary historical scholarship that combines the palpable excitement of archival work and the elucidating intensity of close reading.” - Alan Tansman, author of The Aesthetics of Japanese Fascism

<< Asrelia | The Rainbow Dragon //BLIPP transmission: Apocalypse? No. Everyone left planet Earth willingly. My fam just left late because we were tidying it up for the bugs and bunnies. Now, we're all bummin’ in the Sol. Was it a good idea, was it perfect, did anyone ask my opinion? Nope. Sure we’ve mastered plasma, whatever. We play games all day to do work, grow up constructs for companionship, and busy ourselves around the aquatorial building new orbies – but what progress have we really made towards understanding those amazing ancient and sentient creatures that have always lived among us? None. But then that’s what my sense-journal is all about. Well okay, not entirely. It’s also about holo and inducti-couture, chasing tail, smacking the smooglites, winning lunar landwars, awakenings, boosting my labor index, racing minecarts, finding hot romance on secret missions, and accidentally crashing systems… … seriously, it wasn’t my fault! //BLIPP : End >> *** Join Asrelia, as she reluctantly becomes a Solar Citizen, performing some next level rebellion, and accidentally discovering some hidden truths about the Gaia Initiative: humanity's courageous environmental effort to dis-inhabit Earth and occupy moon-sized biomes circling the sun. [-[Redacted]-] is the first book in the core series of Exo Gaia and Asrelia’s saga. ***EXO GAIA SERIES*** Exo Gaia portrays the saga of human existence outside Earth. Our occupation of the Sol has become the new way of life, and the environmental preservation of Earth, un-inhabited by people, has become humanity's greatest gamble. With no faster-than-light travel, central governance or habitable planets in sight, trillions now occupy the Aquatoria, building moon-sized, self-contained habitat countries called Orbies in this innovative, alluring and brilliantly unexpected Metatopian fiction. Follow Asrelia’s core story through seven novels, and the adventures of the others she meets in their own interwoven ‘facet’ novels as purity and inclusions come together to form the complete and many-sided tale of Exo Gaia.

'Provocative and compelling, it is a spectacular debut' - Daily Mail ____________ Is murder ever morally right? And is a murderer necessarily bad? These two questions waltz through the maddening mind of Michael, the brilliant, terrifying, fiendishly smart creation at the centre of this winking dark gem of a literary thriller. Michael lost his wife in a terrorist attack on a London train. Since then, he has been seeing a therapist to help him come to terms with his grief - and his anger. He can't get over the fact that the man he holds responsible has seemingly got away scot-free. He doesn't blame the bombers, who he considers only as the logical conclusion to a long chain of events. No, to Michael's mind, the ultimate cause is the politician whose cynical policies have had such deadly impact abroad. His therapist suggests that he write his feelings down to help him forgive and move on, but as a retired headteacher, Michael believes that for every crime there should be a fitting punishment - and so in the pages of his diary he begins to set out the case for, and set about committing, murder. Waltzing through the darkling journal of a brilliant mind put to serious misuse, Kill [redacted] is a powerful and provocative exploration of the contours of grief and the limits of moral justice, and a blazing condemnation of all those who hold, and abuse, power. ONE OF THE BEST DEBUT NOVELS of 2019 (the i )

At the height of state censorship in Japan, more indexes of banned books circulated, more essays on censorship were published, more works of illicit erotic and proletarian fiction were produced, and more passages were Xed out than at any other moment before or since. As censors construct and maintain their own archives, their acts of suppression yield another archive, filled with documents on, against, and in favor of censorship. The extant archive of the Japanese imperial censor (1923-1945) and the archive of the Occupation censor (1945-1952) stand as tangible reminders of this contradictory function of censors. As censors removed specific genres, topics, and words from circulation, some Japanese writers converted their offensive rants to innocuous fluff after successive encounters with the authorities. But, another coterie of editors, bibliographers, and writers responded to censorship by pushing back, using their encounters with suppression as incitement to rail against the authorities and to appeal to the prurient interests of their readers. This study examines these contradictory relationships between preservation, production, and redaction to shed light on the dark valley attributed to wartime culture and to cast a shadow on the supposedly bright, open space of free postwar discourse. (Winner of the 2010-2011 First Book Award of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)