The poet Ghalib took a broad view about spirituality and ritual. He told a British friend he was half a Muslim, because while he wouldn’t eat pork, he enjoyed as hurrah peg of whiskey. Did Ghalib retain a medieval belief in cultic efficiency, or did he have a modern’s skepticism about revealed religions in general?…
In 1960, the Soviet Union founded a university in Moscow—soon to be called the Patrice Lumumba University—with the aim of educating students from newly independent states, many of whom came from African countries. Now called the People’s Friendship University of Russia, the university has a famous list of alumni including former heads of state of…
Hospital by acclaimed Chinese science-fiction writer Han Song is a kafkaesque trip through a fictional hospital turned nation-state that explores the Buddhist philosophy on suffering, the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, and the mental state of patients who suffer from chronic conditions.
The beaches of Tel Aviv are some of the most spectacular of any major world city. Sarit Yishai-Levi uses these beaches as a backdrop for her newest novel, The Woman Beyond the Sea, translated from Hebrew by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann. And as the title implies, the water also serves as a boundary, specifically between three generations…
With war comes much trauma, and America’s Asian wars had the additional consequence of Amerasian children—too often left behind by both parents—who more times than not ended up on the streets. There is a term in Vietnamese that translates to “children of the dust” and it’s this concept that drives the story and title of…
Philip Snow opens his engaging, and refreshingly straightforward, history of Sino-Russian relations with an observation born out ever more frequently in the opinion pages of current (at least English-language) newspapers: “Ever since they emerged from the rubble of the Second World War Western societies have looked with apprehension on either Russia, or China, or both.”…
Intergenerational strife is the dominant flavor of this piquant collection of short stories by Anukrti Upadhyay, the award-winning author of Kintsugi.
When girls in the Philippines turn eighteen, it’s customary to have a debut, or coming out party at which eighteen male friends or family serve as “roses” and eighteen females as “candles”, thereby making up the debut’s entourage. Mae Coyiuto’s own debut—of a literary variety—is centered around the coming of age party of a Chinese…
Delving into the world of banking and corporate takeovers, Money Machine tells the real-life story of how a US-based company took control and turned around a struggling Chinese bank in the early 2000s, when China was starting to open up its banking sector.
We are often told that the trend toward globalization is unstoppable, but then some event occurs—whether it is the war in Ukraine or Brexit—that reminds us of the power of nationalism; the emotional attachment that citizens have to their land and people. That power, that emotional attachment, jumps off every page of The War Diary…
Author Maki Kashimada became a member of the Japanese Orthodox Church when she was in high school. The Orthodox Church in Japan is an autonomous Eastern Orthodox Church within the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, one of fifteen subdivisions within the Orthodox Church. There have been Orthodox Christians in Japan since the 1860s, but they…
“Great” is a word that comes easily to mind while handling this book. The author and publishers were apparently determined to make readers appreciate the greatness of this 14th-century version of the Iranian national epic. Included in the more than 500 pages are nearly 300 unique illustrations (more, including close ups) reproduced in actual or…
Long ago at the bottom of a lake lived a large, white snake—revered for his great powers, the local people implored this mythical creature to reform the landscape so that they could cultivate crops and survive the winter. According to the oft-told tale, after striking a deal with the chieftain, the snake god replaced the…
On first glance, one might see the title My Strange Shrinking Parents and the cover illustration of a child with blue school shorts, white knee-high socks and black polished shoes towering over his mother and father dressed in a blue-collared shirt and suspenders and think that Melbourne-based writer and artist Zeno Sworder is writing a…
The publication of Marco Caboara’s Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 is an event to celebrate. At long last, every map of China printed in Europe—from Ortelius’s first map of 1584 to Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map of 1735—has been recorded and referenced in a single source.