NEW YORK — There’s something circular about Matt Vogel’s career, which is perfectly appropriate for the star of an educational children’s show. As a boy, he watched Big Bird on TV. As an ...

These feel like precarious times. Looking at world geopolitics and climate change, the security of humanity suddenly feels fragile. This has drawn a number of novelists to write about possible futures ...

In “Under the Eye of the Big Bird,” Hiromi Kawakami creates a new speculative future for humanity. Translated into English by Asa Yoneda, the book is a series of interconnected vignettes that ...

But maybe not how you’d think. The late actor and puppeteer Caroll Spinney, who played Big Bird on TV for decades starting in 1969, wrote a memoir before he died. A few lines stood out ...

Under the Eye of the Big Bird Hiromi Kawakami, trans. from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda. Soft Skull, $27 (288) ISBN 978-1-5937-6611-5 ...

UNDER THE EYE OF THE BIG BIRD, by Hiromi Kawakami; translated by Asa Yoneda. People are produced in factories. Communities exist in isolation, spread out from one another by design.