Sophia Chang is one of the most influential managers and producers in hip-hop music, yet few would recognize her name. The daughter of Korean immigrants, Chang grew up in an academic family in Vancouver. How did someone with such a presumably pre-determined path end up in New York’s hip-hop scene (and why have many of…
Seventy-five years ago, Japan formally surrendered to the Allied powers in a ceremony aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, thereby ending the Second World War. War brings out the best and worst aspects of human nature—it produces remarkable heroes and cruel villains.
“Decoupling” is the international relations word-of-the-day. American politicians have long criticized the massive trade deficit between the United States and China, but pandemic-driven disruptions to supply chains and deepening tensions between Beijing and Washington have now encouraged policies to start rolling back the links between the two economies. And it’s not just the United States:…
Nancy Jooyoun Kim’s debut novel, The Last Story of Mina Lee, is a unique immigrant story that takes place in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. Kim traces not just the struggles of adapting to a new country but also the tragedies Mina leaves behind in Korea.
On the first page of Return to Sri Lanka, Razeen Sally endearingly describes himself as a wonk, ie a technocrat. A political economist and policy advisor on international trade, his writing normally appears in academic journals; this is his first attempt to write something more personal. He was born and grew up in Sri Lanka,…
American Sarah Mullins, an erstwhile mousy brunette turned blue-eyed blonde, has just pulled off an obscure literary fraud, netting a suitcase of cash and needing a place to hide out, which is why Lawrence Osborne’s most recent novel opens in a luxury apartment in an upscale residential tower block in Bangkok known as “The Kingdom”.
Teens may grimace at the thought of taking SATs, but they have it easy compared with the counterparts in China where millions of children are trained from a young age to succeed in school, all for the one-day gaokao, or university admissions examination. In her new young adult novel, Like Spilled Water—the title of which…
Orrawin is a 17-year-old high school student who goes by the name Winnie. Her twin older sisters, Bunnisa (Bunny) and Aranee (Ari) are college students at Washington University in St. Louis. Their parents made a mistake by not allowing Bunny and Ari to date in high school.
What do you do with a gang of monks who have been condemned to death for immorality? If you are King Rama II of Siam (1809-24), you commute their sentences to hard labor, which consists of making them cut grass for your elephants every day. This is one example of the sometimes quirky humanity of…
The morning after Notre-Dame Cathedral caught fire last year, Diana Darke remarked on Twitter and then on her blog that much of what is considered iconically European about the cathedral—the twin towers, the gothic arches—is Middle Eastern in origin. This created something of a stir and in the provocatively-entitled Stealing from the Saracens, Darke sets…
A House is a Body is the first book-length outing for two-time O Henry Award-winner Shruti Swamy. Most of the stories have been published separately before in such journals as The Paris Review, but they take on a particular strength when arranged together in a collection. Some take place in India, others in the West,…
Is it possible to capture the essence of a city as large as Tokyo in a single book? Debut author Nick Bradley pretty much manages exactly that with this exceptional collection of intricately connected short stories.
“As soon as he took his first spear, he writhed in pain. Leaking urine and making a miserable spectacle, he took nine spears.” The gruesome and cruel execution of one Heizō Takamiya described here took place in Osaka in 1829; the unfortunate Heizō was accompanied by five other people, one a woman (Toyoda Mitsugi) and…
Swati is the last person Rachel Meyer expects to find at her front door in Mumbai. Swati is also the last person Rachel’s husband, Dhruv, expects to find at home after work one day. Swati, a native of Kolkata, is Dhruv’s mother and Rachel’s mother-in-law, and she’s moving in. So starts Leah Franqui’s novel, Mother…
Indian history has two “great” emperors: Ashoka of the ancient Mauryan dynasty and Akbar, one of the Mughals. Ira Mukhoty’s biography of the latter, Akbar: The Great Mughal, is a comprehensive yet simple account of the emperor’s life, one that will be of great help to readers wanting to understand more about the king while…