At the beginning of Frances Cha’s debut novel, If I Had Your Face, a fierce social commentary about gender roles, class divisions and, yes, plastic surgery in South Korea, Kyuri is seated at her plastic surgeon’s office and spots the K-Pop star whose look she copied for her many surgeries. The K-Pop star looks as…
Souvankham Thammavongsa has come a long way from Nong Khai refugee camp in Thailand in which she was born in 1978. Her family, originally from Laos, were able to settle in Canada when she was a year old.
As Asian-American writers are increasingly considered mainstream, populate “best books” and “books to watch” lists, and receive acclaim from both critics and the general public, there has been a rediscovery of works of some of the early pioneers. Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, just re-released by University of Washington Press as part of…
Presented as a confession, this first novel in English from screenwriter and Iranian exile Javad Djavahery is a deeply nostalgic tale of love and loss set against the revolution of 1979. The unnamed narrator, relating events to an unnamed companion, has some odious wrongdoing to admit. He reveals himself to be self-serving and cowardly as…
When Lana Lee adds a catering service to her family’s noodle restaurant in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, it’s not what she expected. At a birthday party for family friend Donna Feng, nanny Alice Kam is found dead in the outdoor swimming pool. It’s not an accident, as bruises are found around Alice’s neck and…
Tehran bus driver Yunus Turabi, participates in a city-wide strike called by the union. The strike is forcefully repressed. Violence begets more violence. Yunus loses his temper in a bus ride as he remembers his peers beaten by police forces. He is imprisoned shortly after, in a life-altering departure from a previous existence marked by…
It would be easy to characterize An Yu’s outstanding debut novel Braised Pork as a mystical journey of one woman’s grief, but that is to almost say nothing about the book at all. Jia Jia is a young woman faced with the sudden suicide of her husband; her story reads like a heavy dream. Its…
The world is perhaps changing when translations from Chinese feature as the first volume in a series of just about anything. Two Lines Press, an independent publisher based in San Francisco, has recently launched the Calico Series of translated literature. “Each Calico is a vibrant snapshot that explores one aspect of the present moment, offering…
At first glance, the only thing linking the stories in Rebecca Otowa’s new book, The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper, is that they all take place in Japan. Yet although they span 17th-century Edo to the present day, two themes recur in most: women’s hardships and the fears of ageing. It quickly becomes clear how, in…
In his first novel in six years, astrophysicist turned essayist and best-selling novelist Alan Lightman, has directed his literary attention away from science and the heavens toward a place quite unexpected. Three Flames is an intimate portrait of three generations of a Cambodian rural family.
Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders, published in Japan in 1946 and now available in English for the first time, employs the plot tricks of early European and American mystery writers to tell the story of a rapidly changing Japanese society around the time of the Second World War.
If you fancy a lost weekend of drink and drugs, Low, the third novel from poet and musician Jeet Thayil, is for you.
Run Me to Earth opens in war-torn Laos in 1969. Three teens—Alisak, his friend Prany and Prany’s younger sister, Noi—freelance in a ruined French villa now serving as a makeshift hospital. They care for each other, ride motorcycles through obstacle courses of unexploded ordnance, and are looked after by, and look after, Vang, a young…
Earlier this year, a fire broke out in the Chinatown archive of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America, spurring a tremendous outpouring of sympathy and support from those fearing that a crucial chapter in the nation’s history was lost forever. A few days later, newspaper reports from that normally bustling neighborhood indicated that, due…
Early in The Aosawa Murders, Riku Onda writes that “it’s impossible to ever really know the truth behind events,” setting the tone of the mystery surrounding a horrible mass murder in 1970s Japan in which seventeen people are poisoned by cyanide after drinking a toast with sake and soft drinks. What starts as a jovial…