A House is a Body is the first book-length outing for two-time O Henry Award-winner Shruti Swamy. Most of the stories have been published separately before in such journals as The Paris Review, but they take on a particular strength when arranged together in a collection. Some take place in India, others in the West, but the power of the book rests in those stories that subtly show how women have traditionally not been recognized for the nurturing roles they take up.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Swati is the last person Rachel Meyer expects to find at her front door in Mumbai. Swati is also the last person Rachel’s husband, Dhruv, expects to find at home after work one day. Swati, a native of Kolkata, is Dhruv’s mother and Rachel’s mother-in-law, and she’s moving in. So starts Leah Franqui’s novel, Mother Land, a story of trying to find oneself in another country and placing the success of that on another person.
The histories of Japan and the United States have been intertwined for a hundred and fifty years. In her new collection of similarly interrelated short stories, Asako Serizawa both mines events from this history as well as reaches into the future.
When Excel Maxino turns ten, his mother, Maxima, takes him to Pier 39 in San Francisco, revealing a life-changing secret: She and Excel are TNT: tago ng tago, Tagalog for hiding and hiding. In his new novel, The Son of Good Fortune, Lysley Tenorio tells a captivating story of undocumented immigrants and their never-ending resolve to remain invisible so they aren’t found out.
When Mary Morris is awarded a sabbatical year from teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, she planned to travel with her husband and adult daughter. A travel writer and novelist, Morris enjoys nothing more than roaming around other countries. But then a freak accident on the ice rink shattered her ankle; her dreams of traveling for a year broke into as many pieces, too.
Writer and editor Mu Shiying declared 1934 the Year of the Magazine, marking a dramatic rise in Chinese pictorial magazines, modeled on American publications like Life and Vanity Fair.
The opening section of Shubhangi Swarup’s debut novel is set in India’s tropical Andaman Islands. Forestry Minister, Girija Prasad, marries clairvoyant Chanda Devi: he works with trees, she converses with them.
Tourism has been an industry hit harder than almost any other by Covid-19. Restarting it is one of the major post-pandemic priorities, although mass tourism has itself often been an environmental and, especially in developing countries, social scourge. Although written well before the outbreak, Yun Ko-Eun’s entertaining eco-satire The Disaster Tourist is only just now appearing in Lizzie Beuhler’s English translation, at a unique time when travel has all but come to a standstill.
Despite the apparent global ubiquity of coffee culture, tea, rather than coffee, is the most popular beverage apart from water. Yet as the authors of Tea is for Everyone: Making Chinese Tea Accessible explain, Chinese tea is still not very well known outside Asia, despite tea having originated there.
Amid the plethora of China memoirs by Western writers over the years, this new one set in Shanghai from 1978 to 1979 stands out a little because it takes place during a time of transition in China. But Anne E McLaren’s Slow Train to Democracy is more than just a record of her time in China or the transition; it’s an account of a little-known democracy movement in Shanghai —around the time the government coined the term “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—that was eclipsed by Tiananmen a decade later.
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