The unnamed narrator of Yan Ge’s novel Strange Beasts of China, a former zoology student-turned-fiction writer, resides in the fictional city of Yong’an, somewhere in southern China, described as “a huge, filthy, ungovernable city, full of all sorts of beasts of unknown origin, and secrets, likewise.” Yong’an perhaps resembles the concrete jungles of nearly every…
In 1910, Manchuria suffered a terrible epidemic that killed tens of thousands of people in a matter of months. Although the 1918 flu pandemic has taken most of the spotlight when it comes to super spreaders a hundred years ago, HY Yeang writes about the Manchurian pneumonic plague in his debut novel, Blue Sky Mansion.
A summer 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted thirty years of worsening climate impacts—and that nothing can be done to stop it. Heat waves. Droughts. Wildfires. Flooding. Given bleak environmental news, staggering global inequality (the world’s richest 1% hold more than 40% of the world’s wealth), a resurgent refugee crisis, and…
Ye Chun’s new collection of short stories, Hao, mainly centers on the experience of Chinese women, both in China and in the United States. Hao, or “good” in Chinese, is the somewhat ironic theme that connects many of the stories, where women have decidedly not-good situations and explore the irony of their circumstances.
In computer engineering, an edge case occurs when someone is writing code and accidentally misses something small, but crucial, that eludes bug-testing. YZ Chin’s new novel, Edge Case, centers around a young Malaysian woman named Edwina who works at a start-up in Manhattan and is in charge of investigating edge cases. But when her husband,…
The trailing spouse has been a perennial subject of memoirs and novels, usually involving women who find their way after some ups and downs. Marcie Maxfield centers her new novel, Em’s Awful Good Fortune, on what she calls the tagalong wife, addressing this topic—one with which she apparently has considerable personal experience—with a combination of…
It’s a summer night in 2006 on Gerrard Street, the main artery of London’s Chinatown. A lone gunman walks into a drinking den, JoJoBar, and shoots one of the customers as he embraces a female companion. The gunman escapes and none of the witnesses will speak to the police. The inexplicable murder of Donald Quek,…
“The Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” was published in The New Yorker in early 2020, generating great interest for Anthony Veasna So’s forthcoming collection of stories, Afterparties. But months before his book came out, So died suddenly from an overdose. “The Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” kicks off this collection and tries to answer a…
Kotaro Isaka’s thriller Bullet Train moves as fast as the train—the Shinkansen—it takes place on and is named after. Already destined to be a movie starring the not-very-Japanese Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock (one imagines some changes en route), Bullet Train, a guilty pleasure if there ever were one, is something of a cross between…
In her debut novel The Illuminated, Anindita Ghose weaves together stories of personal grief and struggle with larger socio-political afflictions. The personal stories of the women in the book are timeless and universal; these are stories of self-effacement and self-discovery that feminist writing deals with anyway. But Ghose refreshingly sets the stories in contemporary India…
Alexander McCall Smith, of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame, has moved, literarily if not literally, from Africa and Scotland to Sri Lanka. He has placed the story of his latest novel The Pavilion in the Clouds, on the grounds of a tea plantation in colonial Ceylon.
By turns brilliant, erotic and piercing, this third novel from PEN/Faulkner award-winner Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi shines new light into how historical oppression, both at a personal and societal level, continues to dominate our present-day thinking.
“Violence composes a fundament of modern Taiwan history,” opens Ian Rowen’s introduction to Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror. In the almost forty years during which Taiwan’s authoritarian ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), kept the country under martial law and suppressed any form of political dissent, thousands of citizens—including alleged proponents of Taiwan’s…
Winnie Nguyen moves to Saigon in 2010 to teach English, but also to become a more resilient, stronger version of her biracial American self. Early in Violet Kupersmith’s new novel, Build Your House Around My Body, Winnie spots a banyan tree outside an old temple in Saigon and hopes she, too, can become like a…
Moïse de Camondo came from one of the most prominent Jewish families in 19th-century Constantinople, but in 1869 at the age of nine he moved with his family to a new promised land for Jews: Paris. At the conclusion of the French Revolution almost a century earlier, France became the only nation in Europe to…