Inter-War Paris was a mecca for artists from around the world, including East Asia and, in particular, the then French colony of Indochina. Thao Thai’s new novel, The Seekers of Deer Creek, centers around a fictional Vietnamese painter and a portrait he created decades ago. The story is part mystery, part family drama, but it’s…
At just 45 square kilometers, Orchid (Lanyu) Island might be tiny but it is a completely different world from nearby Taiwan, to which it belongs and of which it lies east in the Pacific. The island is populated by the indigenous Tao, who live a lifestyle that is tied to the sea. In Eyes of…
“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 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…
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…
Nahai, who hails from Iranian Kurdistan, is regarded as one of the leading contemporary novelists writing in Kurdish. Birds in a Gale, originally published in 2002 and set in the Iran of the 1990s to consider the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979, is one of his most celebrated novels and demonstrates both his…
Osamu Dazai’s Good-Bye is a collection of short stories picked from different stages of his career, most of which have been translated into English for the first time. The final story, which shares the title of the book, was Dazai’s last work before he committed suicide, and remained an unfinished novella at the time of…
Shah Rukh Khan is such a well-known Indian actor that his name is likely to be recognized even by people who are not devotees of Bollywood films. Lavanya Lakshmi pays homage to a 1995 Shah Rukh Khan film, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (or DDLJ as she has it), in her debut novel, Leave and Come…
At first, Cho Yeeun’s Shift, recently translated by Yewon Jung, might be mistaken for a straight-up detective novel. Yi Chang, a police officer in a small seaside town, is searching for the leader of a mysterious cult, who claims to be able to cure any disease with his magical powers, in the hope of saving…
Tom Lin’s debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, paid homage to the American Western, with a Chinese twist, and his lyrical writing style is well suited to the cowboy culture of the American Wild West. He’s back with Babylon, South Dakota, a novel just as colourful as his first. Where his first novel…
A teenage boy goes to a concert of his favourite rock band with his father only to become a victim of mass shooting. In a parallel lifetime, he returns from the concert completely unharmed while his father suffers life-altering injuries. Which of these two versions of their lives is “true”? Swell, Son Bo-mi’s collection of…
Karl Marx famously argued that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Fahmida Riaz’s Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, a historical novel set in 5th-century Ctesiphon, capital of the Persian Sasanian empire at its zenith, shows that this struggle existed long before its appearance in The Communist Manifesto. The…
While it can certainly be awkward for book reviewers to meet authors after having panned their books, these are not usually life-altering experiences. But the same cannot be said for the protagonist in Zen Cho’s novella, The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, a lighthearted story which nevertheless in many respects brings to mind Eileen Chang’s…