South Korea is famous for its workaholic culture: although things are slowly changing, white collar workers often feel pressure to work long hours and to satisfy every whim of their superiors in a rigidly hierarchical company structure. There is pressure to spend evenings at company dinners and even weekends hiking with the team. Among OECD…
Pakistani writer Faiqa Mansab’s second novel The Sufi Storyteller is a South Asian take on stories about stories blended with a murder mystery. It opens with a murder in the library which doubles up as the office of the protagonist Layla, an expert on women and their role in storytelling traditions teaching at a university…
Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
TS Eliot concludes his 1922 poem, “The Waste Land”, with three words: Shantih Shantih Shantih. This Sanskrit term for peace is the title of Daryl Qilin Yam’s novella that centers around the implausible idea of a quick snowfall in Singapore in the middle of the night when most people are still asleep. Yam weaves twelve…
The increasing number of memoirs and novels set in China over the past couple of decades fall into two broad buckets. A handful of Americans taught English in China and returned to write memoirs around the same time as Chinese immigrants to the US and UK began to find success as fiction writers, both in…
Amrita Sher-Gil was an early 20th-century Hungarian Jewish-Indian painter, one of the most celebrated women artists in India of the time. Her father was a Sikh aristocrat and her mother a professional opera singer. She started painting in the western tradition, influenced by the likes of Cezanne and Gauguin, and became known for her paintings…
Singaporean debut author Malcom Seah is a writer of originality, scope and ambition, who is unafraid to take on challenging issues, ranging from eating disorders, to sexual abuse, to the complexities of coming out in a conservative society. He is skilled at plotting, marrying his intricate and intriguing plot with elements of experimental fiction.
Sex is disgusting and unnecessary, men grow foetuses in a sac of artificial skin, and love between two spouses is strictly platonic and familial. These are the building blocks of the strange and deliriously fascinating alternative reality of Sayaka Murata’s newest novel, Vanishing World. Like all of Murata’s previous stories, questions around the terror of…
Yu Hua, one of China’s most-acclaimed contemporary novelists, leapt to prominence, in English as well as Chinese, some three decades ago with his novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, both of which were made into well-received films. Both novels, about ordinary people struggling with extraordinary hardships, were notable for their matter-of-fact, slice-of-life…
Despite the last decade’s increase in the amount of Japanese fiction being translated into English, several genres remain underrepresented. While English-speakers get access to a number of critically acclaimed literary titles, science fiction and romance, for example, are largely neglected despite their popularity in Japan. Historical samurai fiction, which maintains high Japanese readership, in particular,…
Nine year-old Mira is always on the verge of getting into hot water. When she tries to stay underwater in a swimming pool for as long as possible, her mother Leela panics and fears she’s drowning. When Mira’s teenaged brother Ashu and his best friend Rahul smoke and drink in a secret hiding place, Mira…
Great Eastern Hotel is a novel of gargantuan proportions. Set in Calcutta of the 1940s and reconstructed from the perspective of 1970s, author Ruchir Joshi has Saki (aka Robi Nagasaki Jones-Majumdar, a scholar of architecture), put together the life and times of Kedar Lahiri, an artist of zamindar (landowning, feudal) origins, paint critical moments in…
The Malayalam edition of the Mini Krishnan-helmed collections of newly translated classic short stories offers readers a glimpse into the changing social landscape of Kerala. Covering stories written and published across forty decades, the writers of The Second Marriage of Kunju Namboodiri and Other Classic Malayalam Stories navigate the various promises of the early 20th…
Kyungha, a woman living in contemporary Seoul, is burdened by the emotional toll of her past. Deeply empathetic, Kyungha experiences panic attacks and symptoms of anxiety and depression stemming from a harrowing book she wrote about a massacre in a South Korean city. When her friend Inseon suffers an accident, she asks Kyungha to travel…
This stunning debut by Devika Rege explores contemporary Indian politics through a cast of characters at the end of their “quarterlife”: the soul-searching phase in one’s third decade between late-stage youth and genuine seniority.