New Book Announcement: “The Rise and Fall of the Hang Seng Index” by Jake van der Kamp
“Every adult human being is an investment expert. Life is an investment exercise and you are your own best investment adviser.”
New Book Announcement: “Rated R Boy: Growing Up Korean in 1980s Queens” by Yongsoo Park
Rated R Boy: Growing Up Korean in 1980s Queens is a memoir of one family’s move from South Korea to the United States. Told by its child narrator, it describes life in mid-1970s Korea and compares it to life in America, where he is exposed to things that challenge what he’d held to be sacrosanct.
New Book Announcement: “Cherry Blossoms: Sakura Collections from the Library of Congress” by Mari Nakahara and Katherine Blood
Experience the splendor of the annual spring viewing of the nation’s sakura (cherry blossoms) with this stunning keepsake book. Original artwork, photographs, and objects from the Library of Congress collections illuminate the story of these landmark trees and how they came to the nation’s capital as a symbol of friendship with Japan.
New Book Announcement: “The United States of India: Anticolonial Literature and Transnational Refraction” by Manan Desai
The United States of India shows how Indian and American writers in the United States played a key role in the development of anticolonial thought in the years during and immediately following the First World War. For Indians Lajpat Rai and Dhan Gopal Mukerji, and Americans Agnes Smedley, WEB Du Bois, and Katherine Mayo, the…
New Book Announcement: “Geishas and the Floating World: Inside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara Pleasure District” by Stephen and Ethel Longstreet
Stephen and Ethel Longstreet bring the reader on an in-depth tour of the original and most infamous red-light district in Japan—the Yoshiwara district of old Tokyo.
New Book Announcement: “Introduction to Zen Training” by Omori Sogen
An Introduction to Zen Training is a translation of the Sanzen Nyumon, a foundational text for beginning meditation students by Omori Sogen—one of the foremost Zen teachers of the 20th century.
New Book Announcement: “Art, Cult and Commerce: Japanese Cinema Since 2000” by Mark Schilling, illustrated by Tomoki Watanabe
From popular genre films to cult avant-garde works, this book is an essential guide to Japan’s vibrant cinema culture. It collects two decades of the best of Mark Schilling’s film writing for Variety, Japan Times, and other publications.
New Book Announcement: “The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique”, edited by Cathy J Schlund-Vials, Guy Beauregard and Hsiu-chuan Lee
Human rights violations have always been part of Asian American studies. From Chinese immigration restrictions, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, yellow peril characterizations, and recent acts of deportation and Islamophobia, Asian Americans have consistently functioned as subordinated “subjects” of human rights violations. The Subject(s) of Human Rights brings together scholars from North America and Asia…
New Book Announcement: “The Original Meaning of the Yijing: Commentary on the Scripture of Change” by Zhu Xi, translated and edited by Joseph A Adler
The Yijing (I Ching), or Scripture of Change, is traditionally considered the first and most profound of the Chinese classics. Originally a divination manual based on trigrams and hexagrams, by the beginning of the first millennium it had acquired written explanations and a series of appendices attributed to Confucius, which transformed it into a work…
New Book Announcement: “Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts: The Pandit Collection” by Hartmut Buescher
This new catalogue describes the holdings of the so-called Pandit Collection held at the Royal Library, Copenhagen. A diverse collection of more than 1,200 Sanskrit texts, it comprises codices ranging in length from several hundred folios to a single folio, or a manuscript fragment, often produced by educated (or in other cases by less educated)…
New Book Announcement: “Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China”, edited by Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A Fogel
China’s increasing prominence on the global stage has caused consternation and controversy among Western thinkers, especially since the financial crisis of 2008. But what do Chinese intellectuals themselves have to say about their country’s newfound influence and power? Voices from the Chinese Century brings together a selection of essays from representative leading thinkers that open…
New Book Announcement: “Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958” by Yurou Zhong
Chinese Grammatology traces the origins, transmutations, and containment of this script revolution to provide a groundbreaking account of its formative effects on Chinese literature and culture, and lasting implications for the encounter between the alphabetic and nonalphabet worlds.
New Book Announcement: “Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique” by Crystal Mun-hye Baik
In Reencounters, Crystal Mun-hye Baik examines what it means to live with and remember an ongoing war when its manifestations—hypervisible and deeply sensed—become everyday formations delinked from militarization. Contemplating beyond notions of inherited trauma and postmemory, Baik offers the concept of reencounters to better track the Korean War’s illegible entanglements through an interdisciplinary archive of…
New Book Announcement: “The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon” by William C Hedberg
The classic Chinese novel The Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) tells the story of a band of outlaws in 12th-century China and their insurrection against the corrupt imperial court. Imported into Japan in the early 17th century, it became a ubiquitous source of inspiration for translations, adaptations, parodies, and illustrated woodblock prints. There is no work…
New Book Announcement: “Campaign of Knowledge: US Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan” by Malin Johar Schueller
The creation of a new school system in the Philippines in 1898 and educational reforms in occupied Japan, both with stated goals of democratization, speaks to a singular vision of America as savior, following its politics of violence with benevolent recuperation.