2018: Chinese fiction in translation

Our reviews of Chinese fiction—novels and short story collections—in translation this year.
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Our reviews of Chinese fiction—novels and short story collections—in translation this year.
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Contributor

The amount of ink spilled on the 12th-century temple complex Angkor Wat might not fill Tonlé Sap Lake, but it sometimes feels like it might. This Khmer Empire monument dedicated to Vishnu is a UNESCO world cultural site, a global must-see on tourists’ bucket lists—and is the only archaeological monument featured on a national flag….
Vanessa R Sasson’s debut novel Yasodhara and the Buddha takes the life of Gautama Buddha, the stuff of scripture and legend, and lays out a story about love between him and his wife. And a fascinating story it is, too, about ego, love, and renunciation as love.

In the opening story of Saras Manickam’s collection, My Mother Pattu, a sixteen year-old Tamil girl named Meena is sent from her home in Penang, Malaysia to live with an aunt and uncle in Mambang, an inland town halfway to Kuala Lumpur. Her crime: writing and receiving letters from a boy at school. This story,…

On March 9, 1945, American B-29 flying fortresses firebombed Tokyo, Japan, in what Malcolm Gladwell in his new book The Bomber Mafia calls the “darkest night of the Second World War”.

A 2025 round-up of reviews of 79 works in translation from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai through Bengali, Malayalam and Hindi to Arabic, Yazidi, Kyrghyz and French: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, children’s books and classics.
In 1960, the Soviet Union founded a university in Moscow—soon to be called the Patrice Lumumba University—with the aim of educating students from newly independent states, many of whom came from African countries. Now called the People’s Friendship University of Russia, the university has a famous list of alumni including former heads of state of…