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…
Tackling one of today’s most emotive topics, gender transition, debut novelist Nicola Dinan delivers a keenly observed and unflinching examination of that journey and its emotional, social and physical consequences, both for the individual and the people close to them.
Howard Goldblatt, known for his translations of such notable writers as Mo Yan and Su Tong, has a new translation of Chen Yixin’s novel Yuwa, which traces a year in the life of a young boy in a Gansu Province village much like that from Chen’s own upbringing. Chen’s prose is full of color and…
Given that Buddhist thought is widely circulated in popular culture (in reference to mindfulness, wisdom, productivity, and spirituality), it is not surprising that Buddha’s story, or the Buddha himself, has come to be the subject of storytelling aimed at the larger audience. Advait Kottary’s debut novel Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha reconstructs the…
During the 1910s, Hong Kong’s new Governor Francis Henry May seconded a delegation of Sikh police officers to Fiji. May had had a recent stint as Governor of Fiji and before that Captain Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. He felt that Hong Kong’s police force could teach Fiji a thing or two. While…
Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa is the story of a psychiatric patient who claims he once spent time in a land of water-loving creatures out of Japanese folklore. Most of Akutagawa’s contemporaries—as most Japanese readers today—would have been familiar with this famous folktale monster. A kappa is about three feet tall and, according to Patient No 23,…
Lily, living in London, receives a mysterious letter naming her in an inheritance from a stranger in Hong Kong. To claim it, she must travel to Hong Kong. Her older sister, Maya, has received the same letter but chooses to ignore it. A successful lawyer, Maya feels no connection to her mother’s birthplace and doesn’t…
Western scholars have tried, since the 18th century, to explain the differences between Sunni and Shia traditions of Islam; Muslim scholars have tried since the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Epistemological problems beset these efforts. How to describe beliefs, held by individuals across 5,000 miles and 1,400 years?
Brinda Charry found inspiration, she writes in her author’s note, for her debut novel The East Indian, from a little known piece of US history. Dating from almost the first days of the English settlement in the early 1600s, servants and laborers from India arrived in colonial Virginia and Maryland via London, having been England…
Despite a slow drip of new writers, Filipino fiction remains relatively thin on the ground, at least from publishers with wide distribution, and at least when compared to writers from such other countries in the region as Japan and Korea. With his debut novel Forgiving Imelda Marcos, Nathan Go joins a club which, while small,…
Needle at the Bottom of the Sea, five Bengali romances from the 17th to 19th centuries in English translation, reflect on the folkloric world of the Sunderbans “where tigers talk, rocks float and waters part, and faeries carry a sleeping Sufi holy man into the bedroom of a Hindu princess with whom the god of…
When development began in earnest in Beijing, migrants from around China flocked to the capital city for jobs of all sorts. There was money to be made and when young people did not pass their university entrance exams—or didn’t take them in the first place—they viewed Beijing as as good a place to make money…
On 29 September 1985, four men arrive at the Mill House, located deep in the mountains of Okayama prefecture, for their annual visit, but the weekend quickly spirals into a sinister nightmare: two bodies are discovered, a guest goes missing, and a valuable painting disappears. Exactly one year later, the remaining guests gather again, hoping…