A rare and precious glimpse of pre-Khmer Rouge literature, Suon Sorin’s recently translated novel is set during Norodom Sihanouk’s Cambodia. Originally published in 1961, it harks back to the late colonial and post-colonial eras.
Part memoir and part fiction, Ship of Sorrows, translation of the modernist Urdu novel Safina e Gham e Dil by Qurratulain Hyder, is a complex take on the representation of the Partition. Hyder uses the historical event to dwell on the intellectual and artistic angles of the act of living in an era that writers…
Former journalist Deepa Anappara exposes the plight of India’s “missing” children in a story of abduction told from the viewpoint of a nine-year old boy, Jai.
Reviews of Asian fiction, poetry and non-fiction in translation from 2019, from Japanese, Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, Hindi, Farsi, Russian, French and German.
“All the world’s a stage”, said Shakespeare, “ and all the men and women merely players.” His near-contemporary, Chinese dramatist Li Yu goes one step further and says that even in love, or perhaps especially in love, we can only play out our roles.
If you’ve never met Arkady Renko, erstwhile Soviet and now Russian cop, his most recent set of cases, this time in Asia—well, Siberia, to be exact—is as good an opportunity as any to finally become acquainted.
The Chronicles of Lord Asunaro is a curious little volume. In length, perhaps 10,000 words, it is long for a short story but short for a novella. The protagonist, a minor feudal lord in late Tokugawa Japan, was an actual person (apparently: like much else here, it is hard to be sure), his life heavily…
Surrealism is something of an outlier in mainstream English fiction, yet it seems to crop up with some frequency in contemporary Chinese-language literature, at least in those works that find themselves in English-translation. This penchant for surrealism can seem even more pronounced, or perhaps concentrated, in the wider Chinese world and diaspora: Dorothy Tse, Hon…
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco knows a good lede when he writes one: “Viva wants her boobs back”. So starts the first story in this debut collection.
In a welcome development for new voices and regional literature, Penguin Southeast Asia began publishing in Singapore in May. Among its first titles are two collections of short stories, The Heartsick Diaspora by Elaine Chiew, and Cursed and Other Stories by Noelle Q De Jesus.
Trans-culturalism is personified in the life and career of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904).
There is a Kashmir that tourists know about: the one with houseboats, carpets, the one called the Paradise on Earth. There is another Kashmir the world knows through the newspapers, that of militants, a place embroiled in the Indo-Pak border conflict. Madhuri Vijay’s debut novel is a “fictional” attempt to know Kashmir from both extremes—the…
Hiroko Oyamada’s debut novel in English was drawn, it is said, from her experiences working as a temp in the subsidiary of an automaker. If The Factory is any indication, she didn’t take to it.
With the exception of Eileen Chang to whom she is often compared, few writers have become as synonymous with Shanghai as Wang Anyi. Although born in Nanjing, Wang was brought to Shanghai at the age of one by her mother, noted writer and Shanghai native Ru Zhijuan, and her quest to know the city over…
Racial and gender divides in contemporary Britain are cross-examined in this intelligent courtroom thriller by Kia Abdullah. The case under consideration concerns Jodie Wolfe, a 16-year old girl who is facially disfigured by neurofibromatosis. She claims she has been raped by a group of four classmates. The fact that she is white, and the accused…