Eleven-year-old Zadie Ma has what her younger brother Teddy calls a “superpower”: some of the stories that Zadie writes come true. It’s true of the ants whose lives Zadie saves from her mother’s wrath by writing a story about a little ant who anticipates the poison. It’s true of a fox she writes about that…
T his time last year, Penguin Southeast Asia released Amado V Hernandez’s first novel The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit), a classic of modern Filipino literature that had somehow more or less missed the attention of international publishers up to that point. This has been followed, in just the space of just twelve months, with…
In 1921, Somerset Maugham and his partner Gerald Haxton traveled throughout Asia, which included a sojourn in Penang. Maugham gathered personal stories from people he met in Malaya that would inspire his fictional work, The Casuarina Tree, a collection of six stories published in 1926.
You never know what’ll show up in the archives. In 2015, Benjamin Penny stumbled across the 19th-century diaries of one Chaloner Alabaster in the Special Collections room of London’s SOAS. Alabaster left England in August 1855 to take up a position as “student interpreter” in the China Consular Service. He ended up making a career…
Savyon Liebrecht’s novel, The Bridesman, opens with the narrator on a flight from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv. It’s been twenty-four years since Micha left Israel for the United States and he’s heading back on an all-expenses-paid invitation from his beloved aunt Adella. Liebrecht’s novel, translated from the Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann, is a short…
Art imitating life, or is it the other way around? Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character so popular and ubiquitous in popular culture that he almost seems real; many, indeed, have thought him so. Samuel L Clements, by contrast, was a real man so flamboyant, omnipresent and iconic that he can seem almost fictional, a…
When Lee Yeongju burns out at work and leaves her husband, she finds solace in pursuing her childhood dream of opening a bookshop. Her goal is to bring joy to other readers in Seoul and to get back into reading, a pastime she enjoyed back in middle school before she got caught up in the…
It is a battle that has been called “the Stalingrad of the East”, but a more accurate description might be“India’s forgotten battle of World War II”. The Battle of Kohima, which was fought between British/Imperial and Japanese troops during 4 April through 6 June of 1944, according to author Mmhonlümo Kikon, “shaped world history”. It…
Of all the Indian epics, the Ramayana is the best- known: Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, is banished from his kingdom by a jealous stepmother. His wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana choose to accompany him. During the exile, Sita is abducted by Ravana, the king of Lanka. With the help of Hanuman and a…
Divided into two parts set in Iran and the US respectively, Dare the Sea is a new collection of stories from Iranian-American writer Ali Hosseini. The stories, some of which had previously appeared in Guernica, Antioch Review and Story Quarterly, explore Iran’s landscape, culture and how cataclysmic, socio-political changes have shaped the identity and sense…
Four people at a Hyderabad newspaper publishing company drop dead from heart attacks on the same day. It’s not impossible that people could have heart attacks on the same day, but the timing seems suspicious to the police, namely the lead investigator, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Mona Ramteke. This is the lead-in of Aditya Sinha’s…
The toy walkie-talkie set Amiko receives on her tenth birthday, one that she bounces with excitement to use with her yet-to-be-born brother or sister, is never successfully played with; there always fails to be a coherent response from the other end. Through flashbacks and snappy dialogue, Natsuko Imamura’s novella This is Amiko, Do You Copy?…
The twenty-three women photographers featured in Anahita Ghabaian Etehadieh’s Breathing Space: Iranian Women Photographers shed light on the state of contemporary photography from Iran. Etehadieh is the founder of Silk Road Gallery, Iran’s first gallery devoted exclusively to photography. Many of the photographers featured in this book have previously exhibited their works at her gallery…
Earlier this month, Toho Studios released “Godzilla Minus One”—the 37th film in the now almost seven-decade-old franchise. Godzilla has gone through many phases over the past 70 years: symbol of Japan’s nuclear fears, cuddly defender of humanity, Japanese cultural icon and, now, the centerpiece of another Hollywood cinematic universe.
Pwin-u-Lwin is a town in upper Burma, situated in the hills east of Mandalay, known for its cool climate. Yet for many, Pwin-u-Lwin is better known as Maymyo. Renamed in 1896 after the head of the 5th Bengal infantry, Colonel James May, Maymyo was the most famous hill station in colonial Burma. The British occupied…