In Angela Mi Young Hur’s new novel, Folklorn, she writes about a “Korean American Cali-Gothic” family that tackles family trauma going back to the Korean War. The story is a Korean-American immigrant struggle story, yes, but more than that most of it atypically takes place in Sweden, where Hur lives with her Swedish physicist husband…
Prepare to be annoyed, Mona Dash warns the reader on the first page of her debut collection of stories. Those expecting to find tales of saris and jasmine will be disappointed, she says. Instead, the reader should prepare for stories which have not been told before: the voices traditionally marginalized by those belonging to the…
Beh’s family was already in Canada when she was born. Her parents and two older siblings emigrated there from Afghanistan to escape war; Beh’s uncle, Kaka Farhad, had previously settled in British Columbia. Monster Child, Rahela Nayebzadah’s impressive new novel of immigration and family dysfunction, is told from the perspective of thirteen year-old Beh and…
Love makes for a great story, yet love stories are so much hogwash, especially those emerging from India via Bollywood. In Indian reality, love is all too often a scandal with grave consequences for lovers, consequences that arise out of a perception of love as “affairs” that bring dishonor to families’ prestige. Sunjeev Sahota goes…
Lafcadio Hearn, born of an Irish surgeon and a Greek mother, became known later in life as Koizumi Yakumo after marrying in Japan and taking Japanese citizenship to preserve his wife’s inheritance. Hearn or Koizumi was a journalist and an author, and one of the early English writers to introduce Japan to the outside world…
Jeremy Holt is a Korean adoptee and one of three identical triplets. In Made in Korea, Holt’s new comic series along with illustrator George Schall, the concept of identity has new meaning as artificial intelligence abounds and some children are no longer made of flesh and bone.
There is a growing interest in a behavioral phenomenon the Internet has dubbed “main character syndrome”. Whether motivated by narcissism or a healthy sense of self-worth, some people live as though they were the hero in a fictional story and interact with the world around them as though they were its center. The narrator of…
Ann Shin, Canadian of Korean extraction, is perhaps best known as a filmmaker. My Enemy, My Brother, about two Iraqis on opposite sides of the conflict, was shortlisted for a 2016 Academy Award. Another was the well-received The Defector: Escape from North Korea. Shin has now turned her hand to fiction. Her debut novel The…
When grieving is over, when no one pauses to remember, things will be forgotten forever.
If you’ve spent time in Southeast Asia, you’ve certainly met the likes of Julian Lockhardt, the protagonist and narrator of Samarang Hotel. He’s the jaded 56-year-old general manager of the premier hotel in the Laotian capital of Vientiane.
It’s 1979 and Huong tries to find cover as sirens blare outside. She and her two young sons have recently arrived in New Orleans after escaping Saigon and any sound of alarm—even a routine hurricane alarm test—brings her back to the war.
Edward Rutherfurd is known for massive historical novels usually set in cities like New York, Paris and London. They dig deeply into a specific place and he focuses on a certain period. His latest is titled China and spans the last seventy years of the Qing Dynasty: which covers the Opium Wars, Taiping and Boxer…
Heaven is excruciating. Readers share viscerally in the protagonist’s victimization at the hands of sadistic bullies. Fans of Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami’s first novel published in English in 2020, might be expecting another women-centered narrative. Heaven is radically different. This time, an unnamed male narrator describes his appalling position in the social hierarchy of…
Cai Feng is a twenty-two year-old studying for China’s university entrance exams after failing year after year since he first sat for the exams at the age of eighteen. Most of his high school classmates are graduating from university and starting professional jobs, yet Feng continues to disappoint his parents and their expectations for their…
Kokoro can’t bring herself to go to school anymore. She has been the victim of an intense bullying campaign that culminated in a destructive assault on her home; if the bullies find her, she is afraid they will drag her outside and kill her. Kokoro is twelve years old.