“Do not overlook any anomalies… If you find an anomaly, turn back immediately… If you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back… Go out through Exit 8”. Guided only by these cryptic instructions, the unnamed narrator of Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 attempts to break free from an underground loop. Wandering through the same…
Joost Hiltermann’s new novel is a powerful exploration of the 1988 Anfal genocide, launched against the Iraqi Kurds by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime. It may have resulted in up to 100,000 civilian murders during what was officially a rural counter-insurgency campaign. The novel deals with both the devastating impact the Anfal had at the time…
The first book I ever read about India was Romila Thapar’s 1965 History of India, published by Penguin. That little book dazzled with its sprawling scope and storytelling magic, but one also felt the presence of the author’s critical mind tackling perennial questions: what is history; how do we understand it; what is the purpose…
Breakfast, the first meal of the day, in India carries two competing traditions. On one hand, ritual references to food offered to the gods each morning suggest the meal has always held a place of its own. On the other hand, for the labouring classes, breakfast was rarely more than the previous night’s leftovers, hurriedly…
The poetic tradition of China has historically found a warm welcome in Japan, and both cultures draw on a common well of poets, religious currents, and sacred texts. It is thus fitting that two new volumes by essential poets from each country should be published nearly side by side by New Directions. The first, Cold…
Among the earliest examples of sculptural art are representations of the human figure, like the 25,000-year-old Willendorf Venus discovered in Austria in 1908. In western art, fascination with portraiture and anatomical realism were features of the earliest sculptures around the Mediterranean, from Nefertiti and King Tut to Roman emperors and Greek gods. This important volume—the…
James Shea, whose day job is professor at Baptist University, is something of a fixture in the Hong Kong poetry scene. His latest collection Last Day of My Face, however, is published out of Iowa University Press, a result of it having won the Iowa Poetry Prize. It’s not a long collection, less than 60…
Many books about ancient Chinese history are written for those already in the know; there is a dearth of accessible narratives for the general reader. Happily, Andrew Meyer’s new book fills this gap. He skilfully recounts the Warring States Period (ca 470-221 BC), a chaotic era that followed the “slow moving crisis” of the Springs-and-Autumns…
Decolonisation and nation-building were twinned processes in the second half of the 20th century. But for Durba Mitra, author of The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism, the age of decolonisation was also marked by the rise of transnational feminisms. Women from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean challenged authoritarian tendencies…
The Young Die Old is Nguyễn Bình Phương second novel and was published in 1994 to great acclaim in his homeland where it is considered a modern classic. After having been previously published in French and Korean, it is now also available in English, translated by Khải Q Nguyễn. The novel marks a radical departure…
Olivier Hein’s Mother of the World: The Remarkable History of Turkmenistan announces its ambitions early. Where most national histories begin with political dynasties or patterns of migration, Hein starts tens of millions of years ago with the geological processes that formed the Karakum Desert. It is an unusual choice and a revealing one. From the…
French literature has had an outsized influence on Italian opera. Rigoletto, Manon Lescaut, La traviata, Tosca, L’elisir d’amore, La bohème and even Turandot all have French antecedents. Less well appreciated is that Giacomo Puccini’s iconic Madama Butterfly is ultimately, if indirectly, derived from a now obscure French novel. Pierre Loti’s 1887 Madame Chrysanthème—-just released in…
Anthologists are wont to label their collections “the best” or “the greatest”. In The Best of Urdu Short Stories, Mehr Afshan Farooqi does the same. With the focus on the a particular genre, called afsana or kahani in Urdu, she puts her spin on “best” by bringing together new writers along with the canonical Saadat…
As luck would have it, this year two important scholars of India published memoirs reflecting their nine decades of life and learning. One of these, Romila Thapar’s Just Being, will be reviewed in the NYRB by none other than Wendy Doniger, whose For the Love of Stories has just been published in India. These twinned publications…
North Korea is the most tightly controlled country in the world. It is ruled by the Kim family and their control over the country’s 26 million citizens depends on the loyalty of elites of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP)—the communist party that has brutally enforced the Kims’ hold on power since the aftermath of the…