Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World is a massive novel filled with conspiracies, uncertainty, madness and marvels, the inability to process the wide array of what is noticed and reported, and, indeed, what counts as reality. Here is the world, specifically India, except it isn’t. As one character responds in a…
Austrian author Milena Michiko Flašar’s latest novel, Mr Katō Plays Family, makes use of the range of feelings experienced during retirement to explore imagination, relationships, and family. This heartwarming and quiet story, translated from German by Caroline Froh, unfolds in an almost dream-like, stream-of-consciousness style as Mr. Katō connects with others and renews his sense of…
Amid the scorching heat of August 1947, the Edo Tattoo Society hosts a spectacle that captivates the city: a competition to crown the person with the most exquisite body art. Held at a garden restaurant, their first post-War meeting draws a large crowd. Among the attendees is Kenzo Matsushita, recently returned from the war where…
Jyotirmoyee Devi Sen (1894-1988), a pioneering Bengali feminist writer in the first part of the 20th century, is well-known for her novel Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga (The River Churning: A Partition Novel) and her short story collection Sona Rupa Noy (Not Gold and Silver) for which she received the prestigious Rabindra Puraskar, the highest honorary…
Bearing Word opens with a donkey observing life at West Kun Temple through a crack in the stable door. She has been imprisoned here since she was bought two years ago by religious leader Kunmen Virtue.
In his 1994 speech accepting the second Nobel Prize for Literature ever awarded to a Japanese author, Kenzaburo Oe claimed that, in the history of modern Japanese literature, “the writers most sincere and aware of their mission were those ‘post-war writers’” who “tried with great pains to make up for the inhuman atrocities committed by…
In 1903, Eric Blair was born in a bungalow in Motihari, India to a British father who worked in the colonial opium office in town and to a French-British mother. Years later Eric Blair would be known around the world as George Orwell. It’s his Indian roots, his birthplace in Motihari, that inspires Abdullah Khan’s…
Yellowface is a story about theft. But go down a layer and it’s a tale about racial appropriation and authorial ownership. And lying somewhere beyond these surface themes is a palpable anxiety over how the internet shapes public opinion, and the simultaneous necessity and terror of being too online.
In the story that provides the title of Nishanth Injam’s debut collection, The Best Possible Experience, a go-getter tour guide creates a new identity for himself and his son to seek opportunities that would otherwise be impossible for low-caste Dalits. Although Mr Lourenco the tour guide has a positive outlook, sometimes his plans don’t turn…
The tales in Ao Omae’s People Who Talk to Stuffed Animals Are Nice are about sensitive people trying to navigate an unjust world. Take Nanamori, the protagonist of the collection’s title story. The characters in “People Who Talk” are members of the university Plushie Club. Members justify the club to university officials as an organization…
In 1980, a year after Mridula Garg’s Hindi-language novel Chittacobra was published, two policemen appeared at her door at night to arrest her under sections 292, 293, and 294 of the Indian Penal Code, commonly referred to as the Act of Obscenity. The case was built around a scene of just two pages that described…
It’s 1992 and Seoul’s tallest skyscraper has suddenly collapsed, killing thousands and bringing to light just as many questions as to why it happened and who was responsible. This is the backdrop of Hannah Michell’s latest novel, Excavations, an ambitious thriller that is just as engrossing for the whodunnit as is it for the historical…
Sometimes you must write the book you want to read. In the afterword to her debut novel Every Rising Sun, Jamila Ahmed remembers growing up with The Arabian Nights as “a cultural touchstone” while always “wanting more of her”. The “her” is, of course, Shaherazade, the teller of life-prolonging fantastical tales.
Jung-Myung Lee’s Painter of the Wind is set in Hanyang, as Seoul, the capital of the Joseon Dynasty in the late 18th century, was then known. The protagonists are fictionalized versions of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok, both real-life figures who are considered some of, if not the, finest painters of the Joseon Dynasty.
In an early story in Shubha Sunder’s debut collection, Boomtown Girl, the narrator states that her parents felt her younger brother “was old enough to deserve some independence”, yet the teenage brother finds trouble and lands in jail. This theme of independence forms the backbone of the nine stories in her book that mainly take…