About Monkey Business

“An astonishment, by turns playful and profound, that makes you wish it were a monthly.” —Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“Monkey Business is full of deep, funny, wild, scary, fabulous, moving, surprising, brilliant work. There is no literary magazine, no magazine period, that I get more excited about reading.” —Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome

“I feel my brain being reconfigured every time I read Monkey Business. The Japanese sense of story is very different from the American or Western sense of story, and it always opens up possibilities for me.” —Matthew Sharpe, author of Jamestown

Since its first issue in 2011, Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan has showcased the best of contemporary Japanese literature. Monkey Business features the short fiction and poetry of writers such as Hideo Furukawa, Mina Ishikawa, Hiromi Ito, Mieko Kawakami, Sachiko Kishimoto, Hiromi Kawakami, Aoko Matsuda, and Yoko Ogawa; interviews and essays by writers such as Haruki Murakami; new translations of the work of earlier writers such as Rampo Edogawa, Kafu Nagai, and Soseki Natsume; and graphic stories by Satoshi Kitamura and the Brother and Sister Nishioka.

Creating a bridge between Japanese and American writers and the audiences that love them, Monkey Business also features work by American, British, and Canadian writers, including Paul Auster, Rebecca Brown, Charles Simic, Stuart Dybek, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Ben Katchor, Kelly Link, Eric McCormack, Matthew Sharpe, and more! For many of the Monkey Business launch events, writers from Tokyo and writers in the U.S. and Canada have the chance to read each other’s work and then participate in dynamic and often mind-cracking dialogue across cultures. Sometimes a new story develops out of this rich brew: Kevin Brockmeier’s “Continental Drift” was inspired by Mina Ishikawa’s tanka, Satoshi Kitamura’s graphic story “Variation and Theme” was inspired by a poem by Charles Simic.

Monkey Business participates annually in PEN America’s PEN World Voices Festival in New York. Monkey Business has also participated in the International Festival of Authors (IFOA) in Toronto, Tokyo International Literary Festival, and Japan Now in London, UK, among others.

Monkey Business tours across North America with writers from Tokyo. In Asia, Monkey Business has traveled to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Monkey Business is the in-translation offspring of the Tokyo-based magazine MONKEY, founded by Motoyuki Shibata, one of Japan’s most highly regarded men of letters and acclaimed translator of American fiction. Selections for each issue are made by Shibata and Ted Goossen, one of the leading translators of Japanese fiction working today.

Monkey Business is published with the generous support of the Nippon Foundation. The Brooklyn-based literary journal A Public Space is the U.S. partner of Monkey Business.

For all inquiries, please contact monkeybiz@apublicspace.org.