1869 was a time of Russian expansion into Central Asia and British anxiety about India’s northern borders. Because Tibet was closed to Europeans during this “Great Game”, the British trained Indians in surveying and sent them across the mountains as covert mapmakers.
Agri Ismaïl’s Hyper is an unusual migrant family saga of an unlucky, Kurdish family’s epic displacement across countries; […]
The Omani literary scene is currently flourishing, led by authors such as Jokha Alharthi, whose Celestial Bodies won the International Booker in 2019: she provides a foreword to this collection by Hamoud Saud, another prominent Omani writer. He writes in Arabic, and he has already been translated into Azerbaijani, Japanese, and Spanish. In his translator’s introduction, Zia Ahmed describes Saud as: “a teller—qās in Arabic—of short stories, memoirish vignettes, prose poems, and other strange sketches that defy easy categorization.”
Borneo—split between two countries, home to some of the world’s oldest rainforests and a vast array of animal and plant life—is back in the news. The island is set to be home to Nusantara, Indonesia’s new planned political capital set to, maybe, open in 2028. And the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak—different from the rest of Peninsular Malaysia—are griping for more rights and authority to control its own wealth.
Palestinian poet, novelist and commentator Bassem Khandaqji wrote his latest novel, A Mask the Color of the Sky while in an Israeli prison. Any prisoner, anywhere, who manages to write a novel while incarcerated must be commended for persistence, dedication and focus; this one won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His novel is now available in English, translated by Addie Leak.
A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I asked him what it was like. “Like something out of Buñuel”, he replied. Iran’s ruler had invited to him to the infamous coming out party because he had attended the Shah’s alma mater, Switzerland’s aristocratic Le Rosey. That already tells you a lot about the failings of the imperial regime, which today some wish to see returned to power. Readers of Robert Templer’s The Shah’s Party will be spoiled for choice to find motivations for the revolution of 1978 that drove the monarch into exile, in this Tristram Shandy-esque narrative of venality, sycophancy, ineptitude, hubris and cultural myopia. Yet as Templer makes clear, the Iranians enjoyed no monopoly on these shortcomings.
My Home is Dissent is a luminous poetry collection by Pooja Ugrani that constructs verse as one might build a home—brick by tender brick, with the mortar of memory, desire, and defiance. This collection moves fluidly between the everyday and the elemental, where the domestic becomes a site of quiet resistance and reimagining.
“If bears disappeared from this land,” writes Michio Hoshino in The Travelling Tree, “and we could sleep fearlessly in our camps at night, what a boring kind of nature it would be.” Mostly taking the author’s beloved Alaska as their topic, the short essays in this collection explore a human desire to reconnect with a natural world that appears, in its very essence, resistant to such a union. Hoshino nevertheless perseveres, and his enduring love of nature proves insightful reading for those chasing, in the author’s own words, “the other time that flows alongside the frantic daily exertions of humankind.”
To start: a confession. Academics often speak of imposter syndrome—the sense that we lack real expertise on the topics about which are talking or writing. Although it’s largely a psychological illusion, there are situations in which it’s not completely wrong to say that we are imposters. When we teach college courses we have to cover a lot of ground. There is therefore a wide variety in the depth of knowledge we bring to the range of subjects we cover. For some, we are genuinely experts and can talk at length with authority; for others we are operating on a much thinner basic level of expertise. It’s not to say that what we say in lectures or classes is necessarily wrong, but rather that we are well aware that there can be less real understanding than we would like of the nuances underlying a single slide and its 3 bullet points. Over time, we can hope to expand the range of our in-depth knowledge and fill in the areas about which we can talk with authority. For me, reading Gregory Smits’s and Takara Kurayoshi’s books on the Ryukyu islands has been such a process.
My Destiny is the third Liang Xiaosheng book brought into English translation, but the first novel. It follows the short story collection The Black Button published by Panda Books in 1992, and the memoir Confessions of a Red Guard from the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. The latter and My Destiny are both translations by Howard Goldblatt, easily the foremost among Chinese-to-English literary translators of his time. My Destiny will arrive in English publication from China Books six years after its publication in Chinese, and one year after a television adaptation.
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