A family has gathered in a mansion to discuss the inheritance of a wealthy grandfather’s estate. It is a familiar mystery setup, and one that risks cliché, but Yasuhiko Nishizawa takes it into exciting new territory in The Man Who Died Seven Times. Nearly the whole story occurs within a single repeating day, much like…
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu describes herself as “a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat from Yangon, Myanmar”; it perhaps comes as no surprise that she is a poet. She is also one now firmly ensconced in American poetry circles and with an MFA under her belt. Fablemaker is her first full-length collection and…
In Mistress Koharu, a Hungarian love doll comes to life, turning heads as she stalks the streets of Tokyo, while the man who bought her—Akira—strings along two other relationships in a spectacular feat of multitasking greed that benefits no one, least of all him. Written in Japanese by Noboru Tsujihara and translated by Kalau Almony,…
Bornean-Australian novelist, playwright, poet, rapper and visual artist Omar Musa comes with a bit of a pedigree. His debut novel Here Come the Dogs was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award and for the Miles Franklin Award. He was named one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Young Novelists of the Year in 2015.
Cities and villages are not binaries but exist on a continuum. In Reformatting Agrarian Pasts: Urban History from the Countryside in Colonial India, urban historian William J Glover traces the events and infrastructure projects that intertwine rural and urban spaces through specific administrative policies formulated and implemented by the British government. For Glover, the importance…
Rosinka Chaudhuri’s latest work, India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, is the first book-length study of the Young Bengal movement and the contribution of its members to the history of India’s anti-colonial struggle. In this book, Chaudhuri delves deep into their activism, examines their socio-political agenda and analyses the neglect and misrepresentation…
Embedded within Indian ethos, caste is the idea that people (defined by their social positions) are of four types—scholarly-priestly (Brahmins), warriorhood (Kshatriyas), trade and commerce (Vaishyas), and menial jobs (Shudras)—and these are fixed by birth, with no class and social mobility available, especially to the last group. This is no abstract concept; it takes very…
Anyone who has enjoyed learning a second language knows how productive the exchange between a first and second language can be. Yoko Tawada has published fiction and nonfiction in Japanese and German and demonstrates this principle more than most, having moved to Germany as an adult in 1982. She positions herself not as an immigrant…
A collage of epigraphs make up the first few pages of The Elsewhereans. Each subsequent chapter is heralded by a series of locations, dates, photographs, and quotes—some perhaps falsified. Jeet Thayil’s newest work is exactly what its subtitle—“A Documentary Novel”—claims: a partially-fictional documentation of Thayil’s family history, recorded scrapbook-style in bits and pieces. Dedicated to…
Chinese bronzes produced from the latter part of the Song dynasty (12th-13th century) through the end of the Qing dynasty (early 20th century) have long been underappreciated and under-researched. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fine catalogue, Recasting the Past: The Art of Chinese Bronzes, 1100-1900 (accompanying the exhibition of the same name running through September…
Though the Tamil freedom fighter and writer, CS Chellapa, was initially influenced by the energy and zeal of Bhagat Singh’s anarchical resistance to the British Empire, he grew increasingly enamoured by the non-violent, subtle resistance of Mahatma Gandhi. It’s a seismic shift from Singh to Gandhi, one that many in India adopted pre-independence. Yet it…
This epic story centres on an irresistible premise: is the main character “Her Royal Highness, The Begum of Oudh, Shehzadi Wilayat Mahal, Heir to the Last King of Oudh Begum Hazrat Mahal and Wajid Ali Shah” … or just plain old “Mrs Butt”? Satisfyingly, even the latter more prosaic option “Mrs Butt”—horse-loving wife of an…
Nine years in the making, Jemimah Wei’s debut novel is a complicated story of two sisters who found and lost each other amidst the busy, urban, competitive island of Singapore. It provides a glimpse of Singapore without the glitz and glamour, a Singapore in which the expectation of excellence drives a wedge through even the…
Izumi lost her husband and her job. Now she spends her time doing craft projects like sewing handmade stuffed animals. She has come to realize that she spent 20 years acting the role of “successful woman”
The Chao Phraya river, which runs through Bangkok, is the subject of Michael Hurley’s Waterways of Bangkok: Memories, Landscape and Twilights. An ethnographical study of the river, the book portrays not just the river itself, but Bangkok’s relationship with it. Split into five chapters—origins, loss, erasure, belonging and trajectory—the book argues that the Chao Phraya…