To keep a promise to his calligraphy teacher, JJ travels on the ocean liner “Le Cambodge” to Shanghai via Hong Kong in 1954. On board, he makes friend with Fred, and JJ’s longing for friendship will divert him from keeping his promise. After being stranded in Hong Kong with no money or passport, JJ agrees…
In a Singapore shopping mall known only as The Emporium, ten-year-old Bee finds himself dealing with many weird and strange tenants. From a mysterious shop selling illegal gameboy cartridges to the disappearance of a Four-Faced Buddha Statue, Bee witnesses these incidents and must make sense of them.
The street quietly watches them grow, dream and die. In Siddhartha Street characters come together and grow apart to draw you into the tale of a quotidian street, in a quaint corner of South India. On the rooftop of the lone apartment block in the street, it’s time for “Saturday night drinking” and a motley…
Arun, a young Mekong upland girl, falls in love and fascination with the forest and all it contains. The murder of a ranger and a frightening epidemic set her against the unprincipled and greedy exploitation of the natural world. The story encourages understanding of the increasing dangers to the environment and to human life that…
In Burmese Haze (a reference to George Orwell’s classic novel), former US official Erin Murphy gives a personalized history of the past fifteen years of Myanmar history, with particular focus on, if not always from the perspective of, US policy towards this often opaque Southeast Asian country. Murphy was herself in the thick of it,…
In these stories of unease, readers will find an ailing son trying to rewrite his father’s ignoble death, a Seoul taxi driver who succumbs to a devil’s plan, a park that offers one man redemption, and another, King George’s in Hong Kong, that haunts its one-time visitor.
Rise of the Water Margin immerses the reader in a near-future world grounded in American and Chinese cultural and political landscapes bickering over climate responsibility wherein technology challenges humanity to redefine its relationship with the Earth.
Fleeing from grief, Sarah takes solace in a small campus town. Apprehensive yet hopeful, she settles into her new life in a rented studio apartment at Gemvilla. At a dinner party, she meets and befriends her neighbors—a reclusive musician, a literature student, a shaman, a conspiracist, a reluctant engineering student.
The Short Story Collective is a thirteen-part journey through contemporary Japan with the odd stop along the way to visit both the past and the future.
Poetic and devastating, sensuous and politically acute, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Plays explore the forces of global capital as they explode within the lives of everyday people in contemporary China.
Stanley Price has dreamt since childhood of exploring the world. But, when the army posts him to Hong Kong in the 1960s, this officer, scoundrel and rake falls for the glamour, the girls and the gung-ho attitude. Swept along and seduced by this free-wheeling city, he is sucked into a delightful vortex of beer, women…
Strange Bedfellows, a novel by Liu Zhenyun, China’s most renowned writer of satire, and translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin, is a farcical tale of sibling devotion, sexual exploitation, and official corruption, all played out more or less in bed. Though a critique of new mercenary values, scam artists, and the common folks’ vulnerability…
Fay Wu Goodson is a 25-year-old queer, multiracial woman who documents the identity journeys of other New Yorkers. She finds her videography work meaningful, but more importantly, it distracts her from investigating the challenges of her own life and keeps relationships at a distance. When the family’s Taiwanese patriarch dies, Fay’s Asian grandmother moves to…
Not your typical story about an American abroad. Instead, Marcie Maxfield pulls back the curtain on the globe-trotting world of a “tagalong” wife to explore issues of marriage and compromise. Moving backward and forward—both in time and between cities and countries (Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul)—Em’s Awful Good Fortune is woven together thematically by bit…
Generations of prolonged drought and hunger have allowed the harsher voices of the Zarda tribe to set edicts of discrimination against their fair skin members. Ghar, a dark skin cave painter and Dun, his fair skin brother, push back on this discrimination to ensure that Dun and the fair skins can take part in the…