New Book Announcement: “Of the Florids” by Shawn Hoo
Shawn Hoo’s debut poetry chapbook, Of the Florids, begins with an inability to speak of the natural world in the urban fortress of Singapore; a tropical island’s fading romanticism for a city boy.
New Book Announcement: “Salted Plums: A Memoir of Culture and Identity” by Alison Hong Nguyễn Lihalakha
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…
New Book Announcement: “Muscle Memory” by Jenny Liou
In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter’s cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history.
New Book Announcement: “Songs of Memory: Traditional Music of the Golden Triangle” by Victoria Vorreiter
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.
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
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…
New Book Announcement: “Kyoto Stories” by Steve Alpert
Don Ascher is a young American living in Kyoto in the 1970s. He is a student of Japanese. He also teaches English, works at a shabu-shabu restaurant, and hangs out in the company of gangsters, hostesses, housewives, tea teachers, and fellow foreigners. Set amidst the timeless beauty of the ancient capital and its garish modern…
New Book Announcement: “China’s Millennial Digital Generation: Conversations with Balinghou (Post-1980s) Indie Filmmakers” by Karen Ma
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…
New Book Announcement: “Akira Kurosawa and Modern Japan” by David A Conrad
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…
New Book Announcement: “A Flutter in the Colony” by Sandeep Ray
In 1956, the Senguptas travel from Calcutta to rural Malaya to start afresh. In their new hamlet of anonymity—a small settlement on the edge of a British rubber plantation—the couple gradually forget their troubled pasts and form new ties. But this second home is not entirely free and gentle. A complex, racially charged society, it…
New Book Announcement: “Self-Portrait With Ghost” by Meng Jin
From the acclaimed author of Little Gods, whose “gift merges science, politics and art: the kind of audacity our world needs now” (Gina Apostol), comes an immersive and electrifying story collection that explores self-construction, female resilience, and migrations both literal and transformative.
New Book Announcement: “Water Thicker Than Blood: A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood” by George Uba
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…
New Book Announcement: “The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550–1775” by Sophie Volpp
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…
New Book Announcement: “Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh” by Elora Halim Chowdhury
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.
New Book Announcement: “Into the Desert” by Xuemo
This is the story of two women in Western China in the 1990s, on the edge of the Gobi Desert, near the site of the ancient Silk Road. Bound together by both poverty and tradition, they embark upon a perilous journey to change their lives. In Into the Desert, acclaimed Chinese author Xuemo has recreated…
New Book Announcement: “Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China” by Jennifer Lin
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…