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: “Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic”
Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century.
New Book Announcement: “Red Affairs, White Affairs” by Felicia Nay
Hong Kong at the beginning of a new millennium—a teeming city where ritual, religion, the spirits of the dead and the spirit of enterprise meet and clash. For Reini “Kim” Kranich, a young German aid worker obsessed with death, Chinese underwear, Emily Dickinson and cockroaches, it’s a place of fragile hopes.
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: “Drowning in the Floating World: Poems” by Meg Eden
Drowning in the Floating World by Meg Eden immerses us into the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11: the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
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: “The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories” by Rebecca Otowa
From the unique standpoint of an American woman who married into a Japanese family and has lived in Japan for more than thirty years, Rebecca Otowa weaves enchanting tales of her adopted home that portray the perspective of both the Japanese and the foreigner on the universal issues that face us all—love, work, marriage, death,…
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: “Pop Flies, Robo-pets and Other Disasters” by Suzanne Kamata
Thirteen-year-old Satoshi Matsumoto spent the last three years living in Atlanta where he was the star of his middle-school baseball team—a slugger with pro potential, according to his coach. Now that his father’s work in the US has come to an end, he’s moved back to his hometown in rural Japan.
New Book Announcement: “The Complete Story of Sadako Sasaki and the Thousand Paper Cranes” by Sue DiCicco and Masahiro Sasaki
In this middle-reader book, author Sue DiCicco and Sadako’s older brother Masahiro tell her complete story in English for the first time—how Sadako’s courage throughout her illness inspired family and friends, and how she became a symbol of all people, especially children, who suffer from the impact of war.
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 Tibetan Suitcase: A Novel” by Tsering Namgyal Khortsa
We all belong somewhere: a place of our birth, the origin of our being. But there are those who belong to nowhere, an existence without a motherland, or circling in-between, as if in bardo. The Tibetan Suitcase is a story of the peripatetic life of the protagonist, an Indian-born Tibetan.
New Book Announcement: “The Goldfish”, poetry by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul
The Goldfish is a sumptuous, surreal exploration of femininity. The poet inhabits the voice of a goldfish through a series of linguistically experimental poems which plunge us into the glass bowl and invite us to gaze out.