Stradivarius violins are the most coveted in the world and for good reason. Four hundred years ago, Antonio Stradivari created violins and other string instruments in his studio in Cremona, Italy. It’s estimated that about half of the 960 violins he made still survive. Since this expert “luthier” lived during the Age of Enlightenment, could…
It’s 1951 and Jean-Luc Guéry, a perpetual ne’er-do-well, has arrived in Saigon from his native Côte d’Azur to look into the as yet unsolved murder of his brother. Guéry, a hack reporter for the regional Journal d’Antibes, has a fondness for alcohol and a weakness for gambling. His brother, on the other hand, was running…
Paris in the late 1940s was a time of rebuilding. It was also central to the nascent Communist party in Cambodia. Justin Clark’s new novel, The Zero Season, captures this period in a style reminiscent of Graham Greene with its political tension, complicated love story, and colorful settings.
On the southwestern Japanese island of Shikoku, there is a village populated almost entirely by dolls. More than 300 doll likenesses stand-in for the people who have died or moved away from Nagoro. Like many of Japan’s rural villages and even smaller cities, Nagoro has all but disappeared.
Set in an imaginary Eastern land, Hammad Rind’s Four Dervishes centers on four strangers as they gather around a fireplace to exchange stories while taking shelter from the rain. The book merges magical realism with dastan, a form of oral storytelling with origins in medieval Iran: the book’s title is borrowed from the “Tale of…
Unmarried, thirty-something Audrey is stuck in a dead-end office job in Singapore. Her friend and coworker Laura has found joy outside the office as a novelist and suggests Audrey attend a retreat to concentrate on her own writing. Audrey doesn’t consider herself a writer, yet feels she could use a break from the monotony of…
Wesley Leon Aroozoo’s story of love and betrayal in late-19th century Singapore, alliteratively titled The Punkhawala and the Prostitute, centers around two characters at the lowest rungs of a society that has traditionally been portrayed, at least during the colonial period, from the perspective of privileged classes.
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is one of the most highly-regarded authors of modern Japanese literature. Longing and Other Stories collects three works from the first decade of his career, all originally published from 1916 to 1921.
The conceit of Tulip of Istanbul is that it was “found” as an 18th-century handwritten Ottoman manuscript at a stamp and rare book auction. The arrival of the novel itself is almost as serendipitous: originally published in Turkish in 2009 and then in English in 2015 (also curiously published in Turkey), it is now available…
As India emerges into independence in 1947, Englishman Charlie Strongbow and 23 colleagues set about setting up a smuggling operation on the previously uninhabited Cross Island, just off Bombay’s Ferry Wharf. The aim is to supply the good and the great (and the not-so-good) with contraband cigarettes, cheese, booze, perfume and whatever other Western products…
There are perhaps no works in English translation as beloved as those from Russian literature. It’s in this light that Lan Samantha Chang was inspired to write her new novel, The Family Chao, loosely based on The Brothers Karamazov and transposed to a Chinese-American family in smalltown Wisconsin.
In the opening scene of Liu Zhenyun’s 2017 novel, recently translated into English as Strange Bedfellows by the widely acclaimed translators Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin (some critics have gone so far as to assert that Goldblatt’s translations of Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan are better than the originals), we witness the negotiation of…
Some novels catapult readers into a different world than their own. Others, on the contrary, echo one’s life so closely that one cannot but devour them, if only to find out whether the similarities hold ’til the end. Such was my experience reading David Hoon Kim’s Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost.
Trust China to turn white privilege on its head and make a business of it. A decade or two ago, one way expats at loose ends could make a living there, albeit somewhat precariously and less-than-entirely-honestly, was to be “hired by a Chinese company to pose as a professional at events where a Western face…
Cats have a storied pedigree in Japanese literature. One of modern Japanese literature’s first classics, I Am a Cat by Natsume Soseki, is a parody of Meiji-era Japanese society from a cat’s point of view. (2021 saw the English-language release of a faithful manga adaptation by Chiroru Kobato, translated by Zach Davisson.) Thirty years later,…