Cassia and Momo have everything to look forward to in 1979. They are expecting their second child, China is healing from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and Momo has applied to US graduate programs in physics with the hope of eventually bringing his family there for more opportunities. Momo’s main reason for uprooting the…
Classically Russian in length and possibly ambition, Vladimir Gonik’s Orchestra, recently translated into English by Christopher Culver, might prove the sleeper of the year. Three interlocking narratives and families play out over almost 40 years with the doomed Korean Air Lines flight 007 as the linchpin.
The stories collected in Terminal Boredom take up themes that might feel familiar to readers of contemporary Japanese fiction. The characters criticize, challenge, or defy social conventions. Narrators raise questions about identity and agency. But unlike, say, Mieko Kawakami or Sayaka Murata, author Izumi Suzuki died more than three decades ago.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lures the US warship John Paul Jones and its female cigar-smoking commander Sarah Hunt, along with other US warships that are exercising “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, to render assistance to the Chinese trawler Wen Rui. Commander Hunt discovers that the Wen Rui has aboard “some type…
Lady Han is a matriarch in Sichuan province during the last years of the Qing dynasty. She has supported the education of her daughter, Iris, and formally adopted Jasmine, the daughter of her trusted maid, A-mei. Life in the Han household is pleasant and comfortable until 1911, and it’s not because of the impending fall…
Qiao Hongmei is being stalked over e-mail and she’s not sure what to think about it. Tucked away in the comforts of her northern California college town, she receives e-mails from an unnamed sender and finds herself drawn in even as the messages become creepier and creepier. Yan Geling’s new novel, The Secret Talker, is…
It’s 1936 and Chinese-Hawaiian detective Edison Hark is enduring his tenth day at Angel Island, awaiting his release. He’s traveling to San Francisco to help the police there figure out the disappearance of a maid named Ivy Chen and it takes more than a week for the Angel Island jailors to figure out Hark’s importance.
Meddy Chan works for her family’s event company, which specializes in wedding services like hair styling, make-up, cakes, flowers, musical entertainment, and photography. For the upcoming Tom Cruise Sutopo / Jacqueline Wijaya wedding, Meddy also provides a dead body. Jesse Q Sutanto’s entertaining new novel, Dial A For Aunties, brings to mind the movies Weekend…
Vanessa R Sasson’s debut novel Yasodhara and the Buddha takes the life of Gautama Buddha, the stuff of scripture and legend, and lays out a story about love between him and his wife. And a fascinating story it is, too, about ego, love, and renunciation as love.
A short story is an unlikely review subject, but “Person of Korea” has several things going for it: first, it’s by Paul Yoon and in its detached observational style is illustrative of the author’s other work. Second, it’s set among the Korean diaspora in the Russia Far East; although the Russian Far East has begun…
In Touring the Land of the Dead, author Maki Kashimada writes about one woman’s trauma with razor-perfect concision and an austere beauty.
Catherine Menon’s debut novel, Fragile Monsters, is a beautifully written story of one Indian Malaysian family’s history, entwined with secrets and hidden heartbreak, told through the fractious relationship of Durga and her Ammuma, her grandmother Mary. When Durga, a mathematics lecturer returns home to rural Pahang after ten years away in Canada and in Kuala…
Riding to join the army in Armenia, Russia’s greatest poet Alexander Sergeievich Pushkin met a ox-cart heading in the opposite direction, carrying a plain box made of planks. “What are you carrying?” the poet asked the carters. “Griboedov”, came the answer. That was Pushkin’s last encounter with his friend, namesake, fellow playwright, diplomat, and now…
When Shek Yang was a little girl at the end of the 1700s along what came to be known as the “China Coast”, she lost her mother and newborn brother within hours. To make up for the loss of his son, her father trained Shek Yang in sailing, fishing and other seafaring skills. But he…
The title—You are eating an orange. You are naked—gives away that this is not an ordinary novel.