The Eight Corners of the World

Told entirely from the point of view of Yosinori Yamaguchi, a Japanese honors student who excels in his study of English during the nineteen thirties and who is totally devoted to American film, the novel rollicks through Japanese-American history with an ironically detached account of one man's struggle to adhere to the philosophy of yoin ma do, which the narrator quickly translates into his pidgin Japanese-hipster English to mean. ..Go with do flow,"' meaning, as the story unfolds, to take life's ironies as they come.

Gordon Weaver is the author of four novels, ten story collections, and a collection of poetry and has published over a hundred stories in numerous major literary journals. His novels include The Eight Corners of the World (1988), Circling Byzantium (1980), Give Him a Stone (1975), and Count a Lonely Cadence (1968), filmed as Cadence starring Martin and Charlie Sheen in 1991. Weaver’s short fiction collections include The Entombed Man of Thule (1972), Such Waltzing Was Not Easy (1975), Getting Serious (1980), Morality Play (1985), A World Quite Round (1986), (1991), The Way We Know in Dreams (1995), Four Decades: New & Selected Stories (1997), Long Odds (2000), and Last Stands (2004). Founding Editor of the Mississippi Review, editor of Cimarron Review for many years, Weaver was General Editor of the Twayne Studies in Short Fiction, a series of over sixty book length critical studies in short fiction. He taught at, inter alia, the University of Southern Mississippi, Oklahoma State University for many years as a full professor, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Among other awards, Weaver received first place in the O. Henry Award, inclusion in the Best American Short Stories, two national Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, and a 2002 James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction.