Moving Parts

BY Prabda Yoon / TRanslated from thai BY Mui Poopoksakul

Winner, English PEN Translates Award

Selected by Asymptote for September World Book Club

Surreal and puncturing short stories from the Thai master of the form.

In a pink-walled motel, a teenage prostitute brings a grown man to tears. A love-struck young boy holds the dismembered hand of his crush, only to find himself the object of a complex ménage à trois. A naked body falls from the window of a twenty-story building, while two female office-workers offer each other consolation in the elevator…

In these wry and unsettling stories, Prabda Yoon once again illuminates something of the strangeness of modern cultural life in Bangkok. Disarming the reader with surprising charm, intensity and delicious horror, he explores what it means to have a body, and to interact with those of others.

Contributors’ details

The author of multiple story collections, novels and screenplays, Prabda Yoon is also a translator (of classics by Salinger and Nabokov), independent publisher (of books both originally written in and translated into Thai), graphic designer, and filmmaker. Having lived in the USA from the ages of 14 to 26, he speaks fluent English and is at home moving between the cultures.

Mui Poopoksakul is a lawyer-turned-translator. She grew up in Bangkok and Boston, and practiced law in New York City before returning to the literary field. She is the translator of Prabda Yoon’s The Sad Part Was (2017) and Moving Parts (2018), both winners of a PEN Translates award, and of Duanwad Pimwana’s Arid Dreams (2020) and Bright (2019).

Praise

“[Moving Parts] finds truth at the intersection of the absurd and the morbid” — Asymptote

“Scrappy, playful and morbid…. [Moving Parts] is a brilliant, surreal portrait of the Thai capital…: an alienated city with a cartoon-creepy vibe, shiny and dilapidated.” — White Review

“In Moving Parts, Prabda Yoon has created an essential imaginary of the twenty-first century metropolis; drily funny and deeply felt, vivid and vertiginous.” — David Hayden

“Yoon’s masterful stories unfold the drama of modern life, with all the stylistic resonances of the miraculous.” — Eka Kurniawan

“Sleek, supple and soaring – in this extraordinary translation, Prabda Yoon’s stories command your attention” — Eley Williams

MORE INFORMATION

• Publication date: 6 September 2018

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 127mm)

• Extent: 176pp

• ISBNs: 9781911284185 (print) / 9781911284178 (ebook)

• Rights held: World all languages, excluding Thai