Cirrus@Austlit

'Jessica Au’s novella Cold Enough For Snow won the inaugural “Novel Prize” in 2020 while still in manuscript; it’s easy to understand what the judges saw in it. Compact and terse yet flowing, both concrete and ambiguous, intimate but distant, modest yet knowing, the book manages to find universality in the careful observation of detail.' (Introduction)

'I have always found reading Japanese fiction—admittedly in translation—to be something of an out-of-body experience, as if one were watching a reflection in a pond. When one reaches out to touch it, it shimmers and disappears. I do not know whether that is a function of the language, or an artifact of translating the language, the literary culture, or my imagination.'  (Introduction)