New Non-Fiction Books

New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning: Shamanistic Religious Influences on Chinese Literary Tradition” by Nicholas Morrow Williams
20 October 202220 October 2022
This study examines the role of the soul (hun) and the soul-summoning ritual in Chinese literature from ancient times up to the twentieth century. With five case studies from different dynasties, spanning ancient Chu and the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming-Qing transition periods, Chinese Poetry as Soul Summoning shows Chinese poets were inspired by the…
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New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture” by Anne E McLaren
16 October 2022
In pre-contemporary China, folk epics performed at village level helped to construct a sense of regional as opposed to national identity. This is the first book-length study in the West on the folk epics of the Han Chinese people, who are the majority population of China. These folk epics provide an unparalleled resource for understanding…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture” by Anne E McLaren
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity” by Wei Yu Wayne Tan
16 September 202216 September 2022
While the loss of sight—whether in early modern Japan or now—may be understood as a disability, blind people in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) could thrive because of disability. The blind of the era were prominent across a wide range of professions, and through a strong guild structure were able to exert contractual monopolies over certain…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Blind in Early Modern Japan: Disability, Medicine, and Identity” by Wei Yu Wayne Tan
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Salted Plums: A Memoir of Culture and Identity” by Alison Hong Nguyễn Lihalakha
1 September 202220 September 2022
Alison Hồng Nguyễn Lihalakha was just a small child when her family fled Vietnam during the fall of Saigon. From a refugee camp in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, Alison’s family settled in Panama City, Florida, where her father worked as a fisherman until his sudden death. Left to raise seven kids on her own, Alison’s mother…
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New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Songs of Memory: Traditional Music of the Golden Triangle” by Victoria Vorreiter
12 August 2022
High in the mountains of the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar once knew no boundaries, lives a rich multiplicity of traditional peoples. Prominent among them are the Karen, Hmong, Iu Mien, Lahu, Akha, and Lisu, six distinct groups who have maintained their independence, identity, and worldview to a high degree.
Read More New Book Announcement: “Songs of Memory: Traditional Music of the Golden Triangle” by Victoria Vorreiter
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “La plata y el Pacífico: China, Hispanoamérica y el nacimiento de la globalización, 1565-1815” by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales
27 June 202227 June 2022
The Spanish translation of The Silver Way: China, Spanish America and the Birth of Globalisation, 1565–1815—the story of the Manila Galleon—with a new introduction by Elvira Roca Barea: “It explains to us not only what it meant in the past but what it still means today to understand the present and even the future of…
Read More New Book Announcement: “La plata y el Pacífico: China, Hispanoamérica y el nacimiento de la globalización, 1565-1815” by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales
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New Book Announcement: “China’s Millennial Digital Generation: Conversations with Balinghou (Post-1980s) Indie Filmmakers” by Karen Ma
20 June 202220 June 2022
The US-based independent film scholar and movie critic specializing in Chinese cinema, Karen Ma’s most recent work takes the form of creative and inspiring interviews with 7 young Chinese film directors, revealing new trends that are not fully acknowledged in Western scholarship. Many balinghou (born in post-1980s) filmmakers are grassroots artists from smaller towns or…
Read More New Book Announcement: “China’s Millennial Digital Generation: Conversations with Balinghou (Post-1980s) Indie Filmmakers” by Karen Ma
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New Book Announcement: “Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan” by David A Conrad
17 June 202217 June 2022
The samurai films of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa are set in the past, but they tell us much about the present, as do his crime stories, romances, medical dramas, and arthouse films. His movies are beloved for their timeless protagonists and haunting vistas of old Japan, but we haven’t yet fully grasped everything they…
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New Book Announcement: “Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood” by George Uba
2 June 20222 June 2022
In Water Thicker Than Blood, poet and professor George Uba traces his life as a Japanese American born in the late 1940s, a period of insidious anti-Japanese racism, even following the wartime incarceration of 120,000 Japanese, two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens. His beautiful, impressionistic memoir chronicles how he, like many Sansei (and Nisei) across…
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New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550–1775” by Sophie Volpp
31 May 2022
Do the portrayals of objects in literary texts represent historical evidence about the material culture of the past? Or are things in books more than things in the world? Sophie Volpp considers fictional objects of the late Ming and Qing that defy being read as illustrative of historical things. Instead, she argues, fictional objects are…
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New Book Announcement: “Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh” by Elora Halim Chowdhury
29 May 2022
Ethical Encounters is an exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory to illuminate how visual practices of recollecting violent legacies in Bangladeshi cinema can conjure a global cinematic imagination for the advancement of humanity.
Read More New Book Announcement: “Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh” by Elora Halim Chowdhury
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China” by Jennifer Lin
23 May 2022
In 1973, Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin’s Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China, provides a fabulous…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China” by Jennifer Lin
New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “Stone Masters: Power Encounters in Mainland Southeast Asia”, edited by Holly High
19 May 2022
Stones and those who speak for and to them are an important focus of animist religious practice in Southeast Asia, sometimes integrated into world religions, and sometimes not. This book features city pillars, statues, megaliths, termite mounds, mountains, rocks found in forests, and stones that have been moved to shrines, as well as the territorial…
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New Non-Fiction Books
New Book Announcement: “The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan”, edited by Michael Berry
28 March 2022
On October 27, 1930, members of six Taiwanese indigenous groups ambushed the Japanese attendees of an athletic competition at the Musha Elementary School, killing 134. The uprising came as a shock to Japanese colonial authorities, whose response was swift and brutal. Heavy artillery and battalions of troops assaulted the region, spraying a wide area with…
Read More New Book Announcement: “The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan”, edited by Michael Berry
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New Book Announcement: “Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment” by Renny Thomas
21 March 2022
This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which…
Read More New Book Announcement: “Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment” by Renny Thomas

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