Identical and inseparable twin sisters, Roya and Tala live in Tehran. When they fall pregnant around the same time, they dream of going through the same motherhood milestones together and raising their kids together, yet a freak accident destroys these dreams in a matter of moments. This is the backdrop of Nahid Rachlin’s latest novel, Mirage, a psychological thriller that reflects life in contemporary Iran.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
Gerda Philipsborn, Jewish and a part of the 1920s Berlin arts scene, developed a close friendship with a trio of Muslim Indian students. A decade later, she would move to India to join her friends at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Aligarh that was established in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions. Margrit Pernau’s captivating biography shows how Philipsborn ended up in India just before Hitler came to power in Germany. However unlikely the story may seem, Pernau provides a comprehensive narrative of the political movements and openness of 1920s Berlin that explains just how Philipsborn came to spend her final years at Jamia Millia Islamia.
Paul Bevan is the one of the most prominent scholars of early 20th-century Shanghai and it’s thanks to him that English language readers have learned of the contributions of Chinese illustrators, writers, publishers and other artists in late-Qing and Republican-era Shanghai. A few years ago, he translated a novel titled The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai. This novel was originally written in the early 1920s, but takes place several decades before that.
Maaria Sayed is an Indian filmmaker whose experience ranges from London and Italy to South Asia and Korea. Her debut novel, From Pashas to Pokemon, is a delightful coming of age story largely set in a Muslim neighborhood of Mumbai and, as the title implies, traverses both old and new. The story follows a young woman named Aisha from her childhood on Muhammad Ali Road to her student years in the UK and back in Mumbai in her mid-twenties.
Thirty years ago, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn published their first book, China Wakes, to critical acclaim. The couple wrote of their five years reporting about China for The New York Times from 1988 to 1993. Other journalists reporting on China have followed suit and we’ve seen books by Jan Wong, Mike Chinoy, Frank Langfitt, Dori Jones Yang, Rob Schmitz, Lenora Chu, and Karoline Kan, among others. There is also the Peace Corps cohort of Peter Hessler and Michael Meyer, who went on to become journalists and write about China. These books have brought China to readers who are both familiar with the country and who are just starting to learn about it, and in most cases, these journalists chose to write about a certain city, region, or period.
Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her new apartment much—she had the desire to find her birth mother in Korea. The story of her search, discovery and meeting her mother is the subject of her third book, Woman of Interest. This is hardly the first adoption memoir, but O’Neill is a writer of some pedigree with a couple of novels under her belt, which perhaps explains why her memoir at times reads like a thriller and does so right at the beginning.
Hebrew is unique, an ancient tongue that was all but lost for millennia as a spoken language, but was revitalized in the late 19th century and is now the official language of Israel, a country of nine million. Despite this relatively small number of native speakers, Hebrew literature is robust, yet Hebrew literature in English translation remains rare. So it’s unusual to see two new poetry collections come out around the same time. A Winding Line: Three Hebrew Poets by Maya Bejerano, Sharron Hass, and Anat Zecharia, translated by Tsipi Keller and So Many Things are Yours by Admiel Kosman, translated by Lisa Katz include a unique combination of poems that borrow from Old Testament stories and contemporary Israeli life, including politics.
Almost a hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published an Hercule Poirot mystery, Death in the Air, which takes place on a flight from Paris to London. It may not be her most famous, but debut author Ram Murali has recycled the title for his whodunnit set mainly in the foothills of the Himalayas near Rishikesh—where the Beatles studied meditation—but also in small parts in London, Paris, and Bermuda.
Derek Chung is not only a prolific poet, novelist, and essayist, he’s also an acclaimed translator that has brought work from Li-Young Lee, Carl Sandburg, Williams Carlos Williams and others into Chinese. Now a new English translation of his poetry collection, A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist, from May Huang, brings back to life Hong Kong from twenty years ago. As the title and colorful cover artwork imply, the poems describe a Hong Kong that has changed greatly.
The term “Shanghailander”, coined over a hundred years ago, referred to foreigners who lived in Shanghai’s French Concession or International Settlement. In her debut novel, Shanghailanders, Juli Min has reclaimed this term for contemporary use to include a wider spectrum of expatriates and to indicate, somewhat contrary to current narratives, that Shanghai remains—and will remain in the decades to come—an international city.
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