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.
Moving Parts by Prabda Yoon
Prabda Yoon is the author of The Sad Part Was. 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).
The Sad Part Was was shortlisted for the UK Translators’ Association First Translation Prize. She previously guest-edited the Thailand issue of Words Without Borders, and her work has also appeared in various literary journals, including Two Lines, Asymptote, The Quarterly Conversation, and In Other Words. She is based in Berlin.