Trauma echoes differently on the prairies. In her debut novel, Inheritance, Jane Park follows a Korean immigrant family whose father’s hidden and unspoken past shadows their Canadian-born children, unfolding not in the urban centres typical of immigrant stories, but in the stark towns of remote, rural Alberta. As the book opens, New York attorney Anne…
Shefalee Vasudev’s Stories We Wear unpacks the contradictions behind image and appearance in the vast and diverse land that is India. Vasudev’s approach to her subject is encapsulated in a chapter about the homespun fabric once championed by Mahatma Gandhi which she titles “How Khadi Became Uncool”. She interviews several hands-on designer-entrepreneurs who are deeply committed…
Ichiyo Higuchi, a contemporary of Anton Chekhov, Henry James, O Henry and Colette, may well be the most acclaimed and influential writer you have (perhaps) never heard of. Revered in Japan (she appeared in the ¥5,000 banknote for two decades this century), she is far less well-known in English than either late 19th-century European writers…
In one sense the title of Xiaobing Li’s biography of Chinese Admiral Liu Huaqing, China’s Mahan, is somewhat misleading because the author concludes that Admiral Liu has more in common with the onetime commander of the Soviet Navy Sergey Gorshkov than with the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Admiral Liu himself stated…
Miyamoto Musashi (ca 1583–1645) was a heroic figure of Japanese history, a master swordsman revered as a kensei, or “sword saint.” Although he was certainly a real person renowned for his swordsmanship and self-cultivation through the martial arts, little is known about his life. His work A Book of Five Rings offers insights into his…
Julia Kristeva is one of the most formidable minds in contemporary literary and cultural theory, the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based intellectual who gave us Powers of Horror, a 1980 study of abjection that remains a landmark of psychoanalytic criticism, who coined the term “intertextuality”, who spent decades making psychoanalysis and semiotics speak to each other in increasingly…
In one of the cases of history not so much repeating itself as rhyming, the current trend of Chinese Americans moving to China, either for opportunity or to avoid perceived threats, is hardly a new phenomenon. Historian Charlotte Brooks tells such a story from a century ago in her new book, The Moys of New…
First published anonymously in March 2014 as a series of blog posts, Lady No is Kim Hyesoon’s latest collection of poetry translated into English. These posts were written during the most politically significant years of South Korea, when the ferry MV Sewol sank, killing 304 people, including 250 high school students. The event and the…
Vinu P is a “corpse collector”; that is, he retrieves the bodies of those who die “unnatural” deaths—victims of accidents, suicides, and abandonment, and so on—and assists the police in the enquiries that follow. This being India, where Vinu lives and works in Kerala, what might elsewhere be considered the duties of a first responder…
A number of female war correspondents and photographers covered the Korean War for the American media, although much of this history has faded from public consciousness. Eve J Chung resurrects the memory of these journalists in her new novel, The Young Will Remember, an engaging story that revolves around Ellie Chang, a Chinese American war…
Jennifer Wong’s Light Year is a meditation on separation and exile, tracking the concerns of other authors of the Hong Kong diaspora. The title is especially appropriate for the theme: a unit of measurement that calculates distance through the optics of speed and time. Indeed, the poetry focuses on the geographical distance between the United…
At the turn of the 17th century, Florentine Francesco Carletti left from Seville with his father Antonio for Cape Verde, where they were planning to buy slaves for resale in the Caribbean. He ended up in an almost decade-long circumnavigation of the world, the first private citizen to do so. His travels took him to…
Asako Yuzuki came onto the English literary scene with her best-selling novel, Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder, based on the true story of a female serial killer. Her latest novel, Hooked: A Novel of Obsession, also translated by Polly Barton, explores female friendship. The story may not be as frightening as that of…
Much of the contemporary Indian literary landscape features writing in English and Indian languages, but Sheela Mahadevan points to the less-studied Francophone writing in India in Writing Between Languages: Translation and Multilingualism in Indian Francophone Writing. An academic at the University Liverpool and the English language translator of Ari Gautier’s Indian-Francophone novel Carnet secret de…
English language children’s picture books that center around Asian folktales and themes are no longer as uncommon as they once were. Yet it’s still rare to find collections of folktales that originate from Asian countries themselves. Now David Conger, Liana Romulo, Joan Suyenaga and Marian Davies Toth have come together in Asian Folktales for Children…