Yen Press has announced the creation of Avocado House, a new imprint dedicated to fiction and nonfiction in translation, curated by publisher and editor-in-chief JuYoun Lee. The imprint aims to publish approximately 12 titles per year.
Avocado House grows out of Yen On, the company's existing prose imprint, which has published literary fiction in translation including Keigo Higashino's The Miracles of the Namiya General Store and Kiwamu Sato's Tezcatlipoca. The new imprint gives translation work a distinct identity and dedicated home within Yen Press, which was founded in 2006 as a joint venture between Kadokawa Corporation and Hachette Book Group,
"As divisive as the world can seem at times, books have always remained a great unifier—helping us find commonalities across cultures while celebrating our unique differences," Lee said in a statement. "Avocado House aims to be a true home for authors, a place where their voices can connect with readers far beyond borders and language barriers."
The imprint's inaugural list spans Japanese and Korean fiction and nonfiction. Higashino returns with Laplace's Witch, a science fiction mystery translated by Stephen Paul, due this October. The novel, which inspired a 2018 film directed by Takashi Miike, follows a geochemist investigating two suspicious deaths linked to a mysterious girl. In November the imprint will publish Sickness unto Love by Yuki Shasendo, translated by Michael Blaskowsky, a dark coming-of-age novel, and December will see 1,000 Words Left to Live, a short story anthology by Gyatei Murasaki, translated by Matt Treyvaud.
Two 2027 titles round out the debut list: The Curse Called Mother, the Prison Called Daughter by Aya Saito, a nonfiction account of a matricide case in Japan; and The Place of the Flamingo by Korean author Haeyeon Jeong, a thriller about a teacher who covers up a murder to conceal an affair with a student.
