If anyone thought Sei Shōnagon (ca 964-after 1027) was little more than a gossipy, snooty, disingenuously prim and sometimes acerbic observer of life at the effete Heian court of ancient Japan, here is a book to prove that notion completely wrong. Not only can her classic Pillow Book be read on several levels, but it…
Lindsey Miller spent two years in North Korea from 2017 to 2019 when her husband was posted to the British Embassy in Pyongyang. Miller (some research reveals) has a career of her own (she is currently musical director at the Royal Shakespeare Company) and finding herself (one supposes) somewhat at loose ends as a diplomatic…
One would hardly know there had been a pandemic in 2020 if one went by auction results in the contemporary art market. According to the 2020 Global Contemporary Art Market report, the top 10 artists by turnover sold 1530 pieces for a total of almost a half-billion US$. While down a bit from 2019, the…
There is an aphorism, reported to have been spoken by minister Yelu Chucai to Ogodei Khan, Chinggis Khan’s first successor: “You can conquer an empire on horseback, but you cannot govern it on horseback.” Writers on the Mongols are fond of this line, usually inserted when Mongols begin to set up administrations in the settled…
As difficult as it may be now to imagine it, there was an Afghanistan at peace before the “forever wars” which now consume it. Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper’s research among Piruzai Durrani Pashtun of Northern Afghanistan in the 1970s is a record of that other not-in-the-news Afghanistan.
Living along a border can be literally living on the edge, for borders are places of uncertainty where death, humiliation and misery can be all too common. As Suchitra Vijayan points out in her book Midnight’s Borders, this is where entire communities can become stigmatized as foreigners, illegals, smugglers and traitors.
In her debut memoir, Michelle Zauner (also lead singer of the band Japanese Breakfast), mines her experience as a third culture kid to illuminate her development as an artist, and the poignancy of the mother-daughter relationship.
One can forget, when reading this gentle translation, that Li Juan’s account of her time with nomadic Kahakh herders in China’s Altay prefecture, was not written for us, the anglophone audience. Not only was Winter Pasture written in Chinese for a Chinese readership, it was a critical and commercial success. It’s easy to see why.
Academic texts don’t usually manifest themselves as graphic novels.
We Served the People is Emei Burell’s graphic novel treatment of her mother’s stories from the time of the Cultural Revolution in China, in effect a biography covering the time she was a 15 or 16 year old student in Beijing until she left China for Sweden 19 years later.
Never in Nepal’s recent history has talk of China been so heated, or controversial, than in recent years. Since India’s 2015 border blockade, which crippled a Nepal still struggling to rebuild from a devasting earthquake, talk in Kathmandu has ramped up about the benefits of a stronger relationship with the nascent superpower to its north.
Eyck Freymann begins his recent book by asking “What is One Belt One Road?” It’s a deceptively straightforward question, for the answer depends greatly on who’s doing the asking and why. Freyman poses the question on behalf of Americans and, in particular, American policy-makers.
In an essay in Open magazine in 2017, Roderick Matthews, a freelance writer who studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, criticized Shashi Tharoor’s book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India for its one-sided, wholly negative view of British rule in India.
The European Enlightenment relished Sheikh Sa‘di of Shiraz, 13th-century Persian poet and moral philosopher for his work, The Rose Garden, a witty mixture of prose and poetry, morality and ribaldry, lyric and proverbial wisdom.
Books, alas, don’t always come in the right order. Having recently reviewed Oliver Craske’s excellent biography of Ravi Shankar, I found myself wishing that I could have read Finding the Raga before undertaking that task. Amit Chaudhuri, well-known Indian novelist and essayist, is also a singer and a musician, but not just any musician. Thoroughly-versed…