Richard Appignanesi

Almost two decades later Appignanesi published Yukio Mishima's Report to the Emperor, a fictional autobiography of the Japanese poet, novelist, playwright, film director, actor and bodybuilder Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), one of the most important Japanese literary and artistic figures of the 20th century as well as an extreme-right activist.

Appignanesi's novel is set predominantly in post-World War II reconstruction Japan and in Benares, India.

Its narrative builds up to Mishima's horrific ritual suicide by seppuku that accompanied his failed right-wing coup against the Japanese government.

The novel explores some of the more malignant recesses of Japanese society and culture.

Its tone is one of a dark magical realism and the protagonist's journey traverses a variety of grotesque and horrific, yet often lyrically rendered landscapes.

Richard Appignanesi (born December 20, 1940) is a Canadian writer and editor.

He distinguished himself in music at an early age when, in 1953, he was an E. Archambault Pour Mérite gold medal finalist and obtained a music scholarship at the Montreal Conservatory.

He graduated with an Honors BA in English Literature in 1962 from Loyola College, Montreal.

He traveled to England in 1967 and, in 1973, completed a D.Phil.

in Art History from the University of Sussex (The Origins of Art Criticism in the Classical Greek and Later Phases of Antiquity).

Appignanesi has written four novels, the first three of which were published as a fiction trilogy, Italia Perversa, consisting of the novels Stalin's Orphans, The Mosque, and Destroying America, originally drafted in 1967, saw light in the early 1980s.

The trilogy is epic in the scale of its locations – Vienna, Zagreb, Italy while its Quebecois protagonist's travels are ultimately fated to ominous disillusionment through his separatist terrorism.

However, Appignanesi's demanding and highly literate prose, in contrast to the generally well received approachable style of the illustrated texts, produced ambivalent reviews.

It has been described as "A tour of twentieth century European culture with inescapable echoes of Musil, Svevo and Kafka. . . . A fretful, nervous brilliance playing over much of the book a piece of infinite fascination, the sort of novel which, for all its faults, jerks us out of our provincialism."

And "Literary devices and ambitions almost bury this 1967 saga . . . [but] . . . discussions are interesting and Mr. Appignanesi's descriptive skills are considerable."

In 1974, Appignanesi co-founded the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, Ltd. in London with a group of writers that included John Berger, Arnold Wesker, Lisa Appignanesi, Chris Searle and Glenn Thompson.

In 1976, Appignanesi translated into English and published Mexican cartoonist Rius' Marx para Principiantes with the English title Marx for Beginners.

The book's instant popularity prompted the development of the cooperative's international ...For Beginners series of illustrated documentary books, Writers and Readers' most ambitious undertaking.

With Appignanesi as originating storyboard editor, the series was considered very successful, with translations into 16 languages and sales of well over a million copies; it earned Appignanesi a Directors Club (New York) Merit Award for art direction in 1980.

He was married to writer Lisa Appignanesi (née Borensztejn) with whom he has one son, filmmaker Josh Appignanesi; the couple divorced in 1984.

He also has a son, Raphael, and a daughter, Rosa, with different partners.

He lives in London, England.

The cooperative disbanded in 1984.

In the early 1990s he did biographical research on the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, at King's College, London.

He was the originating editor of the internationally successful illustrated For Beginners book series (since 1991 called the Introducing... series), as well as the author of several of the series' texts.

He is a founding publisher and editor of Icon Books.

He was founding editor of the Manga Shakespeare series.

He is a former executive editor of the journal Third Text, and reviews editor of the policy studies journal Futures.

Appignanesi has authored four novels, a graphic novel, a variety of graphic texts, a volume of poetry, monographs and essays on cultural and literary subjects, and has curated several of projects.

Appignanesi was born in Montreal, Canada, of Italian parents.

In 1991, together with Peter Pugh and Jeremy Cox, Appignanesi co-founded and became director of Icon Books Ltd., where he continued his originating editorship of the original illustrated ...For Beginners books, but now re-titled the Introducing.. series.

(It should be pointed out that, independently and separately, Glenn Thompson of the original Writers and Readers relaunched ...For Beginners in 1992 under the name For Beginners, LLC.)

In 2007, Appignanesi undertook a project explicitly targeting a youthful audience.

Under that imprint, the series as of December 2014 had expanded to include some 100 titles of illustrated texts on sophisticated topics in the areas of philosophy, politics, science and the arts.

The series, Manga Shakespeare, consists of Appignanesi's adaptations of several (14 as of 2014) of Shakespeare's plays in which the storyboards are created using selected but direct, unaltered quotations from the original texts, with illustrations by prominent UK-based manga artists.

Appignanesi has authored texts in collaboration with various illustrators.

He has been called a "master of the graphic translation of complex cultural ideas" The Wolf Man: Graphic Freud is an illustrated narrative of one of Sigmund Freud's most famous case studies and founding text of modern psychoanalysis.

Appignanesi's text is accompanied by the work of graphic artist Slawa Harasymowicz.

In the Beginner/Introducing series, Appignanesi wrote and edited Lenin for Beginners/Introducing Lenin, Freud for Beginners/Introducing Freud and Introducing Existentialism, all three titles illustrated by Oscar Zarate.

Two books in the series, Postmodernism for Beginners/Introducing Postmodernism and Introducing Learning and Memory were co-authored with Ziauddin Sardar.