“Sakina’s Kiss” by Vivek Shanbhag
It’s a brave step to have a coward as your protagonist but acclaimed author Vivek Shanbhag’s unlikeable creation proves to be a memorable device for exploring power, patriarchy and politics in contemporary India.
“Mending Bodies” by Hon Lai Chu
Fifteen years have passed between the publication of Hon Lai Chu’s 《缝身》 (“Seam”) and Mending Bodies, its English translation by Jacqueline Leung. Readers who feel those years mark a drift toward dystopia may detect the eerie touch of prophecy in Hon’s writing. Yet she also digs into human problems with neither expiration date nor borders.
“The Second Book of Prophets” by Benyamin
It’s not every day one comes across a new novel about Jesus as a social activist, least of all one in translation from Malayalam. So Ministhy S’s recent translation of renowned Indian writer Benyamin’s 2007 novel, The Second Book of Prophets, is unexpected, to say the least. One need not know much about biblical stories…
“Rabbit Moon” by Jennifer Haigh
A midnight phone call can mean one of three things: a wrong number, a robocall or a terrible emergency. When suburban Bostonian, Claire Litvak receives a phone call from someone at the American consulate in Shanghai, it’s of the third variety: her daughter Lindsey is in the hospital on life support after she was hit…
“One More Story About Climbing a Hill: Stories from Assam” by Devabrata Das
One More Story About Climbing a Hill: Stories from Assam is the latest book by renowned Assamese writer Devabrata Das. This collection of eighteen short stories, translated from the Assamese original, offers a unique and varied portrait of contemporary Assam. Remarkably, despite being translated by several individuals, including the author himself, the prose maintains a…
“Counterattacks at Thirty” by Sohn Won-pyung
South Korea is famous for its workaholic culture: although things are slowly changing, white collar workers often feel pressure to work long hours and to satisfy every whim of their superiors in a rigidly hierarchical company structure. There is pressure to spend evenings at company dinners and even weekends hiking with the team. Among OECD…
“The Sufi Storyteller” by Faiqa Mansab
Pakistani writer Faiqa Mansab’s second novel The Sufi Storyteller is a South Asian take on stories about stories blended with a murder mystery. It opens with a murder in the library which doubles up as the office of the protagonist Layla, an expert on women and their role in storytelling traditions teaching at a university…
“The Book of Sana’a: A City in Short Fiction” edited by Laura Kasinof
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.
“Shantih Shantih Shantih” by Daryl Qilin Yam
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…
“Transplants” by Daniel Tam-Claiborne
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…
“Six Days in Bombay” by Alka Joshi
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…
“Swimming Lessons” by Malcom Seah
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.
“Vanishing World” by Sayaka Murata
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…
“City of Fiction” by Yu Hua
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…
“Semishigure” by Shuhei Fujisawa
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,…
