Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
Category Archive: Fiction
TS Eliot concludes his 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”, with three words: Shantih Shantih Shantih. This Sanskrit term for peace is the title of Daryl Qilin Yam’s novella that centers around the implausible idea of a quick snowfall in Singapore in the middle of the night when most people are still asleep. Yam weaves twelve interrelated stories around this snowfall, bringing together a dozen characters from various backgrounds who all find themselves awake at four in the morning.
The increasing number of memoirs and novels set in China over the past couple of decades fall into two broad buckets. A handful of Americans taught English in China and returned to write memoirs around the same time as Chinese immigrants to the US and UK began to find success as fiction writers, both in English and in translation. Daniel Tam-Claiborne’s debut novel, Transplants, combines these two viewpoints: a Chinese-American woman named Liz moves to a small town in Shanxi province to teach English and befriends a local university student named Lin.
Amrita Sher-Gil was an early 20th-century Hungarian Jewish-Indian painter, one of the most celebrated women artists in India of the time. Her father was a Sikh aristocrat and her mother a professional opera singer. She started painting in the western tradition, influenced by the likes of Cezanne and Gauguin, and became known for her paintings of Indian villagers. Sher-Gil died at the young age of twenty-eight, supposedly from a botched abortion. Alka Joshi’s latest novel, Six Days in Bombay, is loosely based on Sher-Gil’s story and is a mystery of sorts set not only in Bombay, but also Prague, Paris, Florence, and London, mainly in 1937.
Singaporean debut author Malcom Seah is a writer of originality, scope and ambition, who is unafraid to take on challenging issues, ranging from eating disorders, to sexual abuse, to the complexities of coming out in a conservative society. He is skilled at plotting, marrying his intricate and intriguing plot with elements of experimental fiction.
Sex is disgusting and unnecessary, men grow foetuses in a sac of artificial skin, and love between two spouses is strictly platonic and familial. These are the building blocks of the strange and deliriously fascinating alternative reality of Sayaka Murata’s newest novel, Vanishing World. Like all of Murata’s previous stories, questions around the terror of abnormal entities in polite society and atypical approaches to intimacy form the book’s core, puncturing every page with warbling instability. Vanishing World, like all of Murata’s other stories in English, has been translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Yu Hua, one of China’s most-acclaimed contemporary novelists, leapt to prominence, in English as well as Chinese, some three decades ago with his novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, both of which were made into well-received films. Both novels, about ordinary people struggling with extraordinary hardships, were notable for their matter-of-fact, slice-of-life rendering of their characters’ tribulations. Although his next novel, Brothers, a decade or so later, made more explicit use of farce and satire, in City of Fiction, Yu Hua seems to have returned to his roots.
Despite the last decade’s increase in the amount of Japanese fiction being translated into English, several genres remain underrepresented. While English-speakers get access to a number of critically acclaimed literary titles, science fiction and romance, for example, are largely neglected despite their popularity in Japan. Historical samurai fiction, which maintains high Japanese readership, in particular, rarely makes it into English. This trend may be shifting, however, with the recent publication of Shuhei Fujisawa’s Semishigure and the upcoming release of a new, three-volume, translation of Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi, which was previously available only in abridged form.
Nine year-old Mira is always on the verge of getting into hot water. When she tries to stay underwater in a swimming pool for as long as possible, her mother Leela panics and fears she’s drowning. When Mira’s teenaged brother Ashu and his best friend Rahul smoke and drink in a secret hiding place, Mira sometimes lurks nearby. And when Leela dates a swimming instructor from their club, Mira learns the true intentions of “Coach” long before her mother does.
Great Eastern Hotel is a novel of gargantuan proportions. Set in Calcutta of the 1940s and reconstructed from the perspective of 1970s, author Ruchir Joshi has Saki (aka Robi Nagasaki Jones-Majumdar, a scholar of architecture), put together the life and times of Kedar Lahiri, an artist of zamindar (landowning, feudal) origins, paint critical moments in Indian history from the day of the funeral procession for Rabindranath Tagore to the catastrophic famine of Bengal, the Dharamtolla Street procession for the Quit India movement, the Tebhaga movement among the peasants, and the Naxalite movement.
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