New Book Announcement: “Taiwan in 100 Books”
Taiwan in 100 Books is an accessible introduction to the history and culture of Taiwan through one hundred English-language books.
New Book Announcement: “Arrivals & Departures: Journeys in Poems” by Reena Kapoor
Arrivals & Departures is Reena Kapoor’s debut poetry collection. This anthology takes readers on a journey through a multitude of places, time periods, and emotions, including the nostalgia of one’s homeland, the suffering and resilience of women who experienced India and Pakistan’s 1947 Partition, parenthood, and life’s other simple pleasure. Kapoor draws readers into new…
New Book Announcement: “Pin Ups” by Yi Shun Lai
Pin Ups is a memoir about Yi Shun Lai’s long, ragged relationship with outdoor sports. Along the way, she discovers what it means to find a place for herself in the great outdoors—and what the act of carving out a place of her own taught her about tokenism, women’s leadership, and representation in a white…
New Book Announcement: “Quagmire in Civil War” by Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl
Our understanding of civil war is shot through with the spectre of quagmire, a situation that traps belligerents, compounding and entrenching war’s dangers. Despite the subject’s importance, its causes are obscure. A pervasive “folk” notion that quagmire is intrinsic to certain countries or wars has foreclosed inquiry, and scholarship has failed to identify quagmire as…
New Book Announcement: “After the Nobel Prize 1989-1994: The Non-Fiction Writing of Naguib Mahfouz”
Naguib Mahfouz was familiar to newspaper readers across Egypt for his column in the leading daily Al-Ahram, in which he reflected on issues of the day, from domestic and international events, politics and economics to culture. This volume brings together his articles written between January 1989 and the knife attack in October 1994 that almost…
New Book Announcement: “The ‘Other’ Shangri-La: Journeys through the Sino-Tibetan frontier in Sichuan” by Shivaji Das
The ‘Other’ Shangri-La is a work of narrative non-fiction based on Shivaji Das and his wife’s journey through the Sino-Tibetan frontier land of western Sichuan. It describes the rugged landscape of this region that comprises 7,000-metre-high mountains, deep gorges, vast grasslands and the world’s most dangerous roads.
New Book Announcement: “Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense” by Peter Gordon and Juan José Morales
Just around the corner from Rome’s Pantheon, on the Via di Sant’Ignazio, is the famed Biblioteca Casanatense. Among its precious books and manuscripts is an album of 76 striking watercolours made in Goa around 1540, the work of an anonymous Indian painter for an unknown Portuguese patron.
New Book Announcement: “Nonlocal, or Youth and Night” by Christophe Bolduc
Concerning education, Nietzsche asked, “How can the individual be integrated into the counterpoint of private and public culture; how can he both sing the melody and simultaneously make it the accompaniment?” At its core, this is the same question that Nonlocal explores.
New Book Announcement: “The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing” by Si Nae Park
As the political, economic, and cultural center of Chosŏn Korea, eighteenth-century Seoul epitomized a society in flux: It was a bustling, worldly metropolis into which things and people from all over the country flowed. In this book, Si Nae Park examines how the culture of Chosŏn Seoul gave rise to a new vernacular narrative form…
New Book Announcement: “Longmen’s Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage: When Antiquity Met Modernity in China” by Wang Dong
This thoroughly researched book provides the first comprehensive history of how a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the Central China Plain, Longmen’s caves and the Buddhist statuary of Luoyang, was rediscovered in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
New Book Announcement: “My Village: Selected Poems 1972-2014” by Wu Sheng, translated by John Balcom
Wu Sheng has written vivid poems about rural life and the land since the 1960s, when he became one of Taiwan’s most popular poets. His poems are rooted in the soil, imbued with an unshakable affinity for the people who till it, sweat over it, and eventually are buried in it, and serve as his…
New Book Announcement: “Chinese Brothers, American Sons” by Ed Shew
Tens of thousands of men from southern China changed the course of American history with their tireless work in the California gold fields in the 1850s and their crucial contribution in the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad in the following decade.
New Book Announcement: “Floral Mutter” by Ya Shi, translated by Nick Admussen
A math teacher by day, Ya Shi lives 1,000 miles from the Beijing literary scene, but is celebrated among lovers of Chinese poetry from the conservative to the avant-garde. His jagged and intense short lyrics, wild nature sonnets, punchy couplets, and genre-bending, surreal poetic essays daringly combine iconoclasm and heart.
New Book Announcement: “Saving Sun Bears: One Man’s Quest to Save a Species” by Sarah Pye
In Asia, adult sun bears are poached for body parts which are thought to have medicinal properties. Many orphaned cubs, with their small size and endearing features, are kept illegally as pets. Malaysian ecologist Dr Wong Siew Te, or “papa bear”, has dedicated his life to saving the world’s smallest bear from extinction.
New Book Announcement: “Tales of Ming Courtesans” by Alice Poon
From the author of The Green Phoenix comes a riveting tale of female friendship, honor, and sacrifice for love, set in 17th century China and featuring the intertwined stories of three of the era’s most renowned courtesans, escorts skilled in music, poetry and painting who could decide themselves whether or not to offer patrons bed…
