New Book Announcement: “The Short Story Collective: 13 Tales from Japan” by Andrew Innes
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.
New Book Announcement: “Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital”
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.
New Book Announcement: “Alluring Monsters: The Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization” by Rosalind Galt
The pontianak, a terrifying female vampire ghost, is a powerful figure in Malay cultures, as loved and feared in Southeast Asia as Dracula is in the West. In animist tradition, she is a woman who has died in childbirth, and her vengeful return upsets gender norms and social hierarchies. The pontianak first appeared on screen…
New Book Announcement: “The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology” by Robin Hemley and Xu Xi
An all-in-one craft guide and anthology that examines stories by leading writers from Japan, China, India, Singapore and beyond as well as those from Asian diasporas in Europe and America. While still taking stock of the traditional elements of story such as character, viewpoint and setting, Xu and Hemley let these compelling stories speak for…
New Book Announcement: “Thai Politics in Translation: Monarchy, Democracy and the Supra-constitution”, edited by Michael Connors and Ukrist Pathmanand
Since Thailand’s political crisis began with royalist mobilization against prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2005, observers have been treated to easy clichés about reactionary Thai elites. The chapters in this book invite readers to refrain from quick judgement and engage with the conservative norms of sections of the middle class, military, intellectuals and state ideologues.
New Book Announcement: “You, and Others”, poetry by Devendra Bisaria
Devendra Bisaria’s first publication contains poems written over a period of almost thirty years—from his teens, when he started writing, to twenty years ago. The poems in this collection bear witness to Devendra’s own internal evolution as a person as well as his keen observation of the external environment and circumstances that fueled, and frequently…
New Book Announcement: “Mo Yan Speaks: Lectures and Speeches by the Nobel Laureate from China”
Mo Yan’s fiction has captivated a global audience for years, and his speeches are just as riveting. They provide rare insights into the complex thought processes of one of the most influential writers in the world. Mo Yan’s passion for this work comes across clearly in his lectures and speeches, reinforcing the strong emotions his…
New Book Announcement: “Price’s Price” by Chris Maden
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…
New Book Announcement: “Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore”, edited by Esther Vincent and Angelia Poon
Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore contemplates and re-centres Singapore women in the overlapping discourses of family, home, ecology and nation. For the first time, this collection of ecofeminist essays focuses on the crafts, minds, bodies and subjectivities of a diverse group of women making kin with the human and non-human world as they navigate…
New Book Announcement: “Strange Bedfellows”, a novel by Liu Zhenyun
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…
New Book Announcement: “book of the other” by Truong Tran
Just as the denial of tenure for Nikole Hannah-Jones with University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wang Ping at Macalester have made headlines for academic racism targeting Black professors and professors of color, Truong Tran’s book of the other is a timely commentary on the inequities built into the white establishment within academia…
“Soviet Seasons” by Arseniy Kotov
Photographer Arseniy Kotov has a thing for “modernist” Soviet architecture and has made a career of documenting it via (this being now a decidedly post-Soviet world) Instagram, entries to which were gathered into a book Soviet Cities which has been followed by Soviet Seasons, a collection of photos divided into four quarters, nominally by time…
New Book Announcement: “The Balance Tips” by Joy Huang-Iris
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…
New Book Announcement: “From Rural China to the Ivy League: Reminiscences of Transformations in Modern Chinese History” by Yü Ying-shih
This book is much more than the memoir of the scholar who has been hailed as the most important living Chinese historian of our times—it is also an invaluable record of a history of our times, witnessing the cultural, political, and social transformations of what Professor Yü Ying-shih notes as the period of the most…
New Book Announcement: “The Dark Side of News Fixing: The Culture and Political Economy of Global Media in Pakistan and Afghanistan” by Syed Irfan Ashraf
This book provides a local journalist’s perspective on a four-decade long regional contribution to global news production. Fixers are local journalists hired to help global media outlets in developing news stories on wars. The book shows how the fixers’ risky news pursuits made possible for global media to access distant regions and dangerous caves on…
