Agri Ismaïl’s Hyper is an unusual migrant family saga of an unlucky, Kurdish family’s epic displacement across countries; refugees who struggle and fail to achieve a sense of being at home anywhere they live. An inventive novel of ideas, it is a hard, pitiless satire on migrants’ love of Western values (whether Marxism or Capitalism),…
The Omani literary scene is currently flourishing, led by authors such as Jokha Alharthi, whose Celestial Bodies won the International Booker in 2019: she provides a foreword to this collection by Hamoud Saud, another prominent Omani writer. He writes in Arabic, and he has already been translated into Azerbaijani, Japanese, and Spanish. In his translator’s…
Palestinian poet, novelist and commentator Bassem Khandaqji wrote his latest novel, A Mask the Color of the Sky while in an Israeli prison. Any prisoner, anywhere, who manages to write a novel while incarcerated must be commended for persistence, dedication and focus; this one won the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His novel is…
A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I asked him what it was like. “Like something out of Buñuel”, he replied. Iran’s ruler had invited to him to the infamous coming out party because he…
“If bears disappeared from this land,” writes Michio Hoshino in The Travelling Tree, “and we could sleep fearlessly in our camps at night, what a boring kind of nature it would be.” Mostly taking the author’s beloved Alaska as their topic, the short essays in this collection explore a human desire to reconnect with a…
To start: a confession. Academics often speak of imposter syndrome—the sense that we lack real expertise on the topics about which are talking or writing. Although it’s largely a psychological illusion, there are situations in which it’s not completely wrong to say that we are imposters. When we teach college courses we have to cover…
My Destiny is the third Liang Xiaosheng book brought into English translation, but the first novel. It follows the short story collection The Black Button published by Panda Books in 1992, and the memoir Confessions of a Red Guard from the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. The latter and My Destiny are both translations…
Part memoir, part meditation on the practice that Makato Fujimura has popularized as “slow art”, Art Is: A Journey into the Light is pithy yet expressive. In the acknowledgments, Makato Fujimura recalls his publisher’s exhortation to create a “beautiful book” emerging out of the malaise of the COVID-19 pandemic and this is indeed in many…
Intelligence failures are quite common in the history of warfare. During the First World War, according to a new book by Arabist and author Eamonn Gearon, British intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara (in what later became Iraq) against troops of the Ottoman Empire spurred the creation of the Arab Bureau, which Gearon describes…
In In Search of Green China, Ma Tianjie traces how China has achieved impressive net progress towards its environmental goals, including cleaner air and water, and hard targets for peak greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time closing the political space that once allowed citizens, NGOs, and journalists to shape that progress. The result,…
Jiban Narah’s The Yellow Metaphor is an unassuming collection of poetry, written from 1990 to 2023, that draws from the Mising and Assamese traditions of north-east India. Occasionally embedded in the English translation are the original Mising words, a translator’s decision to retain the otherworldliness of the poems. Assamese geography, fauna, and history feature prominently…
There is a moment in Mohammed Hanif’s new novel where Baghi, founder of a cut-rate English tuition centre in Rawalpindi watches a Himalayan quack hawk libido supplements to a crowd of labourers on the morning after erstwhile PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. Grief hangs in the air like smoke. The country is in shock. And…
History is often told as the story of distinct societies, focusing on the ambitions of kings and the outward march of empires. Yet there is an arguably richer tradition that views the connections between societies as the true engines of human development. Just as Peter Frankopan (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World)…
Time is one of the grand themes of literature and art. A new comics anthology, Delay, brings together 11 pieces of graphic fiction in the short form from various Southeast Asian artists including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and connects the concept of time to such situations as feeling stuck, waiting, hesitation and anxieties…
Set in the tea gardens of colonial Assam, Moonlight Saga follows the communities who built and maintain these delicate ecosystems on the frontiers of India, and the tensions and pressures of plantation life. Originally published in Assamese in 2022 and recently translated into English, this family saga set on the Atharighat Tea Estate in Assam, just…