“At least 45,000 years ago, an artist using red ochre painted a mural of warty pigs at the back of a cave near modern-day Makassar on Sulawesi. The artist ‘signed’ the work with hand stencils. The mural is the oldest known representational art associated with modern Homo sapiens anywhere in the world.” This is just…
Death is an uncomfortable subject yet in all cultures and societies there are jobs like undertakers and pathologists that deal with it on a daily basis. In the Chinese countryside, funeral cryers are a big part of the way people mourn death. Wenyan Lu’s debut novel, The Funeral Cryer, centers around a middle-aged woman in…
The Solitude of a Shadow is about revenge, and the road to it. Its publication marks Devibharathi’s first novel after decades of novellas, essays, and plays—one of which won last year’s Sahitya Akademi Award. It has now been translated from Tamil by N Kalyan Raman for a wider audience. The story is straightforward: a young…
In 1844, a young Japanese artist named Sakurada Kyūnosuke (1823-1914) happened upon a daguerreotype, an early form of photography that had been invented in France five years earlier. Sakurada, who generally went by the name of Renjō, was at the time an apprentice in the studio of a painter of the Kanō school, a loosely…
Ludwig II was born in 1845. He became King of Bavaria in 1864, when he was only 18 years old. Within Bavaria, he is sometimes called the Swan King or even the Fairy Tale King. Outside of Germany, he is sometimes called Mad King Ludwig.
A picture, it is said, is worth a thousand words. A Danger Shared is a collection of photographs taken by Melville Jacoby, an American exchange student and later war correspondent in China, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines (for Henry Luce’s Time and Life magazines) in the mid-to-late 1930s and early 1940s. Author Bill Lascher’s text…
The food of Taiwan has been the subject of a number of recent books, such as Frankie Gaw’s First Generation and Clarissa Wei’s Made in Taiwan. Chop Fry Watch Learn by Michelle King joins them, although it is a scholarly work, rather than providing recipes. While the first two do also include cultural, historical, and…
As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development, indigenous tribal people—the Adivasis—continue to be overrepresented among the country’s poor. Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India, with a total population of more than a hundred million people speaking more than three hundred different languages. Although their historical presence is acknowledged by…
Born of a Swiss mother and an Indian father and raised in England, Meira Chand’s novels have been set in Japan, Singapore, and India, and a couple have been adapted for the stage in London and Singapore. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she lived in India. Her recent book, The Pink, White…
Publisher Oxford University Press hails Activism and Post-activism as the first-ever English language work on the birth and development of South Korean nonfiction film. Drawing on more than 200 films and videos, Jihoon Kim’s trailblazing book charts the history of documentary filmmaking in the South from its early “activism” period in the 1980s to what…
Seicho Matsumoto was one of Japan’s most celebrated mystery writers —with two dozen novels to his name from the late 1950s, at a time when Japan was rebuilding after the war until just before his death in 1992—but only in recent years his work has been translated into English. Point Zero, translated by Louise Heal…
Although subtitled “Family Fortunes” and presented as being the story of the Jhaveri business family in Gujarat, Sudev Sheth’s recent history Bankrolling Empire is as much, if not more, about the wider arc of the decline of the Mughal Empire. Whether one is interested in the specific role of finance in the Mughal Empire or…
Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, there is a small village with “a golden four-lane highway near it but not a single tamarind tree.” Here, the novel’s unnamed narrator spends his days loitering around town and smoking cigarettes. This routine—and everything about life as he knows it—changes with the arrival of Kamala, a widowed mother, a schoolteacher,…
Therapist Haesoo Lim used to appear on television to provide her professional opinion on matters in the news. But after speaking about a famous male actor, her career took a nosedive when the actor committed suicide. Haesoo not only lost her job, but her marriage also fell apart. Kim Hye-jin’s new novel Counsel Culture, translated…
Set in the metropolis of Kolkata, A House of Rain and Snow describes the struggle of a section of middle-class Bengali society to cope with the effects of globalization during the early 1990s. It tells of their passion for art and culture, which too was affected by changing times. The author, Srijato, an eminent Bengali…