Seemingly small and, thereby, homogenous, Nepal is a nation-state fraught with problems common to almost all of South Asia: ethnic diversity that leads to tensions between the various groups, painful identity politics with the aim of securing group rights, debates about who originated in an area that has come to be defined by migration over…
Sometimes you must write the book you want to read. In the afterword to her debut novel Every Rising Sun, Jamila Ahmed remembers growing up with The Arabian Nights as “a cultural touchstone” while always “wanting more of her”. The “her” is, of course, Shaherazade, the teller of life-prolonging fantastical tales.
Jung-Myung Lee’s Painter of the Wind is set in Hanyang, as Seoul, the capital of the Joseon Dynasty in the late 18th century, was then known. The protagonists are fictionalized versions of Kim Hong-do and Shin Yun-bok, both real-life figures who are considered some of, if not the, finest painters of the Joseon Dynasty.
“Humankind, I like to believe, can be divided into two groups: one group swears by science fiction, the other cherishes only mysteries. I belong to the latter.” Thus begins C. M. Naim’s homage to the writers who once provided generations of Urdu-speaking mystery-lovers hours of sleepless delight.
In an early story in Shubha Sunder’s debut collection, Boomtown Girl, the narrator states that her parents felt her younger brother “was old enough to deserve some independence”, yet the teenage brother finds trouble and lands in jail. This theme of independence forms the backbone of the nine stories in her book that mainly take…
Travelers to Turkey often return with a ceramic plate or tile as a souvenir of their sojourn, many of these have designs based on or inspired by the ceramics from Iznik (the ancient Nicaea, across the Marmara from Istanbul), a major center of production between the 15th and 17th centuries, a history probably unknown to…
Sex in the Land of Genghis Khan is a title and subject guaranteed to elicit curiosity. Mongols have not had the kind of study lavished on medieval, premodern, and modern European sex lives. This is the first sustained look at Mongol and Mongolian sexuality through history: a short, accessible but serious book, with a strong…
Tackling one of today’s most emotive topics, gender transition, debut novelist Nicola Dinan delivers a keenly observed and unflinching examination of that journey and its emotional, social and physical consequences, both for the individual and the people close to them.
Howard Goldblatt, known for his translations of such notable writers as Mo Yan and Su Tong, has a new translation of Chen Yixin’s novel Yuwa, which traces a year in the life of a young boy in a Gansu Province village much like that from Chen’s own upbringing. Chen’s prose is full of color and…
The title of French writer and filmmaker Éric Vuillard’s short book on the First Indochina War (1946-1954) exudes sarcasm. For Vuillard, there was nothing “honorable” about France’s efforts to hold on to its Indochinese empire by force. In this, he mirrors those on the American left who ridiculed the Nixon-Kissinger formula of “peace with honor”…
A shift of perspective offers the opportunity for new insights into a familiar topic. Try a different standpoint, turn the map into a different orientation, and new patterns emerge. This is what Sheila Miyoshi Jager aims to do for East Asian history in The Other Great Game, by moving Korea from the margins of the…
In the late 19th century, a group of Mennonites leave Russia for what is now Uzbekistan. Driven out by Russian demands that the pacifist group make themselves available for conscription, and pushed forward by prophecies of the imminent return of Christ, over a hundred families travel in a grueling journey, eventually building a settlement and…
Given that Buddhist thought is widely circulated in popular culture (in reference to mindfulness, wisdom, productivity, and spirituality), it is not surprising that Buddha’s story, or the Buddha himself, has come to be the subject of storytelling aimed at the larger audience. Advait Kottary’s debut novel Siddhartha: The Boy Who Became the Buddha reconstructs the…
During the 1910s, Hong Kong’s new Governor Francis Henry May seconded a delegation of Sikh police officers to Fiji. May had had a recent stint as Governor of Fiji and before that Captain Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. He felt that Hong Kong’s police force could teach Fiji a thing or two. While…
Beyond the Siliguri Corrido, the so-called chicken neck of Indian territory that runs between Bangladhesh and Nepal, lies an India very different from that of common preconceptions. This is an area surrounded by Tibet, Bhutan, Myanmar and Bangladesh, hemmed in by the Himalaya. As Samrat Choudhury writes in the introduction to his new book, Northeast…