Kay Enokido was the longtime president of the stately Hays-Adams hotel in Washington, DC, hosting dignitaries like the Japanese monarchy and the Obama family before the president was sworn in. But before she was a hotelier, and before that a journalist, she had another, earlier story, one that provides the heart of her book, Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Elisa Shua Dusapin’s debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, won a National Book Award, among others. It was set in South Korea, while her next two novels were respectively set in Japan and Russia. Of Franco-Swiss and Korean heritage, Dusapin has crafted her fourth and most recent novel, The Old Fire, as a homecoming of sorts: she’s turned to her birthplace in the Dordogne. Aneesa Abbas Higgins, who had worked with Dusapin on her previous three books, has communicated Dusapin’s latest with this tender, melancholic and evocative translation.
With A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar seems to avoid the dreaded “sophomore slump”. Her well-received debut, A Burning, published during the first year of the pandemic, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her second had done even better: a finalist (among other acclaim) in the National Book Awards this year. The novel is short, yet packed with mystery, intrigue, and a warning or two about global warming, income disparity and xenophobia.
In 1981, Japanese actress and television personality Tetsuko Kuroyanagi published a best-selling memoir, Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window, an engaging story set during her unusual primary school years that happened to take place during World War II. Her book sold 4.5 million copies in Japan in just its first year and has been translated into thirty languages, eleven from India alone. The book tells of Kuroyanagi’s rambunctious childhood that got her expelled from her first school, partly because she refused to sit at her desk and instead wanted to look out the window at the sparrows outside.
Dahlia Abraham-Klein’s grandfather Haim Abraham lived to 102. She was fortunate to have gotten to know him when she was younger, but it wasn’t until Haim passed away in 1999 that Abraham-Klein learned more about his life thanks to a journal he had left behind. This journal chronicled not just Haim’s life but that of the former Jewish merchant class in Central Asia. Haim wrote his journal entries in Judeo-Farsi, written in a unique cursive Hebrew script from Jews of Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Judeo-Farsi is almost extinct now, so it took Abraham-Klein a decade to find someone who could translate and decipher the journal entries into Hebrew. She has taken many of these journal entries and has woven in her own narration in her new book, The Stateless Central Asian Merchant: The Life of Haim Aghajan Abraham Based on His Journal 1897-1986, a unique look into a Jewish community that no longer exists.
A Swiss-Italian-Spanish author fluent in six languages (including English), Vanessa Fabiano first traveled to China more than thirty years ago and resided in Shanghai and Beijing around the time of SARS in the early 2000s. Her new collection of related stories, Chinese on the Beach, makes use of this timeframe, a period of growing friendships between Chinese and foreigners.
Author and activist Sarah Joseph was born and raised in present-day Kerala, known for both Jewish and Christian populations dating back well into the first millennium CE. A Christian herself, she writes both poetry and prose in Malayalam, often centering around religion and feminism. A decade ago she won accolades for a novel based on the Ramayana. Now she has a new novel, Stain, translated by Sangeetha Sreenivasan, that re-imagines the biblical story of Lot, largely set in the town of Sodom. Although readers of the English translation will undoubtedly be familiar with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, one would have to assume that Joseph’s original Malayalam audience either also know the story or find resonance in a biblical story set long ago and far away.
Regardless of culture, mother-daughter relationships can be fraught and tensions incomprehensibly continue to be passed down generation after generation. Gish Jen addresses her own contentious relationship with her mother in her new novel, Bad Bad Girl, her tenth book and the first she’s devoted to her mother.
Qing Yuan works in a morgue, cleaning bodies. He grew up in a cultured family before 1949, studying art and literature in university. Qing Yuan’s father owned a jewelry shop and got into trouble with the new government after he tried to hide a small amount of gold during the early days of nationalization. Qing Yuan was punished for his father’s capitalist ways and when Ruyan Meng’s novel opens in 1966, he’s been the morgue keeper of the title for sixteen years.
Ann YK Choi made a splash on the literary scene a decade ago with her debut novel, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, a coming of age story of a young Korean-Canadian who grew up in her family’s convenience store in 1980s Toronto. This book was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards, among many accolades. With her new novel, All Things Under the Moon, Choi effortlessly switches genres from contemporary to historical fiction.
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