Sweet malida is a dish made from rice grains softened in water mixed with sugar and dried fruit and nuts. It’s enjoyed in Afghan, Indian and Pakistani homes, and it’s also a dish popular with the Bene Israel, a Jewish community with a 2000 year history in India. Zilka Joseph has written before about her Bene Israel background, but her new book, Sweet Malida: Memories of a Bene Israel Woman, is a more vivid account of the origins of the Bene Israel and its many delicious culinary dishes.
Author: Susan Blumberg-Kason
At first glance, Sophie Wan’s debut novel, Women of Good Fortune, set around a glamorous wedding in contemporary Shanghai, may seem like an archetypal romantic comedy of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, and girl gets boy at the end. But it soon becomes evident that the novel is instead a more sobering story that calls to mind Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face, another debut novel that features a group of friends who are trying to navigate the sometimes-impossible expectations and demands on young women in East Asia.
Memoirs from Cambodian and of Cambodians remain rare, at least in English. A Cambodian Odyssey by Haing S Ngor came out almost forty years ago and became a bestseller a few years after the Oscar-award winning film, The Killing Fields. It is hard to think of many since. Until now with Chantha Nguon’s new memoir, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes, written with Kim Green.
Mariko Tatsumoto has made her name as a children’s author; her new book, Blossoms on a Poisoned Sea: A Novel of Love & Betrayal in Minamata, Japan, set during the 1956 industrial disaster, is suited for a more mature audience of adults and young adults. It’s a thrilling coming of age romance of a poor daughter of a fisherman family and a wealthy son of a corporate executive, one that probably resonates more than ever with contemporary readers after the recent pandemic.
Looking back, 1976 was the most tumultuous year in modern Chinese history. Zhou Enlai died in January, Zhu De in early July, and Mao in September. The three main founders of the PRC were gone, unleashing a new era. And in late July that year, Tangshan in Hebei province suffered the worst earthquake in China’s recorded history with a conservative death toll of 242,000. Another 164,000 were injured and over 4000 children were left orphans overnight.
Sports writer Ben Rothenberg took special notice in August 2020 when three professional tennis tours were shut down for a day in protest for Black Lives Matter. There were protests around the US that summer, but this one was different. Never before had professional tennis shut down during a tournament, but also Rothenberg saw that the person who initially decided not to play on 27 August was someone he had been covering for years: the shy and reticent Naomi Osaka. Rothenberg’s new biography covers Osaka’s quick rise to fame and her maturity as a world champion. Osaka is also a visible example of how modern individual sports such as tennis can scramble nationalities and identities.
In her letter to readers at the beginning of her debut novel, The Storm We Made, Vanessa Chan writes that Malaysian “grandparents love us by not speaking” and goes on to explain that this only pertains to the four years of Japanese occupation during World War II. In every other subject, she writes, Malaysian grandparents do speak and at great lengths. But when it comes to the war, they cannot bring themselves to talk about the horrors from that time.
Over the last thirty years, Shanghai has been demarcated by the two sides of the Pudong River, the almost-futuristic Pudong and the historic Puxi. These two areas inspire the title of Aube Rey Lescure’s impressive debut novel, River East River West, a story of people more complicated and layered than they may first appear, set alternately in the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, times in which people from around China and abroad moved to Shanghai to reinvent themselves.
It’s difficult not to compare Kotaro Isaka’s third novel in his loosely connected trilogy to Bullet Train, the book and film that put the series on the map. The Mantis, translated by Sam Malissa, centers around a veteran hitman and includes the same lightheartedness and plot twists of Bullet Train, but stands on its own as a touching father-son story.
Edogawa Rampo (or Ranpo) was one of the most prolific Japanese mystery and crime writers of a century or so ago, and his work has remained in the public eye, whether in Japanese film, manga, video games, or translations. Born Taro Hirai, in 1923 he made his literary debut under a pen name chosen in homage to his literary hero, Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to write dozens of novels, novellas and short stories.
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