In this collection of travel stories, Canadian journalist and photographer Andrew Scott takes us on a lively romp through China, Japan, Laos, India (twice), South Korea, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia and Turkey. The congenial Scott exhibits just enough seriousness when it’s needed and is always sensitive to the people he meets, refreshingly non-judgmental and patient, although he admits that this insouciance sometimes took a good deal of effort on his part to maintain.
Category Archive: Reviews
Drawing on the Chinese classic novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s debut novel is a beautifully-written if haunting story set in coastal Shandong province, San Francisco and Idaho. Eight years ago Jenny Tinghui Zhang learned from her father, after he traveled through Idaho, of the brutal murders of Chinese men in the 1880s who were falsely accused of killing a white shop owner in that state.
It is widely accepted that Japan is a country deeply in touch with the natural world. From wall hangings of cranes and turtles, to carp banners flapping in the breeze, haiku about a frog in an old pond, and folk tales about foxes and badgers, Japanese arts and culture are suffused with images of nature. Moreover, in the present day, tourism is sold using images of cherry blossoms, autumn colors, and monkeys bathing in hot springs.
“One might ask,” begins Riaz Dean in the introduction to his new book The Stone Tower: Ptolemy, the Silk Road, and a 2,000-year-old Riddle, “how this book is different from the many others about the Silk Road.”
Di Renjie or Judge Dee (as he’s better known in Western popular culture) was a Tang Dynasty magistrate first fictionalized in an anonymous 18th-century Chinese detective novel. Dutch diplomat author Robert van Gulik translated and popularized the character in a series of novels beginning in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1960s. The character was picked up by other Western authors and television from the late 1960s. There is something fitting in Qiu Xiaolong, poet and author of the well-received “Inspector Chen” novels, rebooting the character.
Woman Running in the Mountains opens with Takiko Odaka waking to labor pains like “a voice calling Takiko’s name in her sleep.” Her parents have urged her to abort the child of a fleeting affair. She has chosen to raise the child on her own, never even informing the baby’s father.
Paper Republic is an alliance of Chinese-to-English translators who have come together to promote Chinese literature in English translation, with a focus on new writing. It has now published its own guide to contemporary Chinese literature, a directory of authors and publications prefaced by six essays on different aspects of Chinese writing. Each entry in the directory includes a biography, and a list of selected works, subdivided by form—novellas, short stories, essays, etc.