It is 1916, the middle of World War I. Madhusudan Chandra Joshi is a young clerk who works at the District Courts of India. As he journeys to Heidelberg to study law, a chance meeting with a mysterious revolutionary, Amir Farooqui, sets him on a headlong collision with forces he does not understand. He is…
Awarded by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize recognises the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English. The $10,000 prize is named for Lucien Stryk (1924-2013), an internationally acclaimed translator of Japanese and Chinese Zen poetry, renowned Zen poet, and…
Meet Singapore’s strangest inhabitants. The snake that cartwheels. The snake that clones itself. The snake that flies through the air. Snakes are everywhere in Singapore, gliding through mangroves, sunning on bicycle paths, swimming in the strait. Yet so many of us fear them. In Snakes of Singapore, Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray invites you to look again….
A compilation of reviews from the last twelve months for Women in Translation month, including fiction and non-fiction, poetry as well as novels. These include translations from Mandarin, Urdu, Malayalam, Japanese, Bengali, French, Korean, Assamese and Hindi. Click the posts below to read more. They appear in no particular order.
In My Wild City, acclaimed nature writer Neha Sinha takes us on an unforgettable journey through the hidden wildernesses of the bustling metropolis of Delhi, India, where she finds as much natural splendor in her urban environment as one would expect from a rural countryside. Exploring her city over many days and nights, Neha traces…
Xuenan Cao offers an unexpected angle on China’s technological rise, spotlighting the role of deficit-driven improvisation. As Cao demonstrates, where printing paper, computers, and microchips have been in shortage, media improvisations and AI gadgetry have filled the gap and become the unlikeliest accelerants of tech imaginaries. Equal parts media-historical and literary analysis, the book connects…
How can a small democracy resist the influence of a powerful authoritarian neighbor? Taiwan is frequently praised for its successful economic development and peaceful transition to democracy, serving as a model for other developing countries. However, it faces substantial challenges, both from internal political divisions and external geopolitical pressures. As Stormy Seas reveals, Taiwan’s political…
From Lab to Life: How AI Works in China argues that China built the world’s first governed AI ecosystem, a market in which regulation, commercial capability, and distribution developed together. Since August 2023, China has required consumer-facing generative AI services to clear government filing before public launch. The book traces how that machinery emerged and how it determines which models reach users and which companies gain distribution. Twenty chapters across…
A memoir-in-essays that, in its exploration of language, family ties, and Taiwanese history, distills how the handmade holds memory, inheritance, and the work of care-taking. “Tactile memory feels like it is the easiest to lose,” Brenda Lin writes in Unraveling Threads. But in these exquisite essays, she demonstrates just how the tactile bolsters personal, familial,…
Born in Jiangsu Province in 1889, Xiong Yanghe grew up on his family’s estate. His early decades were marked by warfare among various factions within China and devastating encroachments by foreign powers as well. The worldview gave great impetus for his career choice and set him on a course that would affect all around him….
East Asia’s Yuan Empire (1271–1368), led by the nomadic Mongol people and Qubilai Khan (1215–1294), was marked by cross-cultural exchange and significant developments in trade, technology, and infrastructure. The Mongol visual culture, however, has often been ignored or dismissed as insignificant in the operations of the Mongols’ own empire. The Woven Image: The Making of…
A poignant debut novel that explores mother-son relationships, cross-cultural conversations, and the tribulations of getting older. Chitra Demands to Go Home tells the story of Chitra, a 75-year-old Bengali woman who feels trapped in an assisted living facility and just wants to go home. Chitra spent her life taking care of her children and her husband…
Rashmy writes poetry in a Tamil unique to the East Coast of Sri Lanka, embedded in its ecologies and heavily influenced by its folklore, centuries of trade, and echoes of Qur’anic cadence. His work is both archive and testimony, making him one of the most significant contemporary poets of in the Tamil language. In Songs…
It’s almost time for Miya’s favorite holiday, the Mid-Autumn Festival. She loves all the holiday traditions: moon gazing, lighting lanterns, and best of all, baking and eating mooncakes! But after an incident, Miya’s father seems to have lost a little of the holiday spirit. Miya has an idea to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival in a…
In The Transpacific Chinese Diaspora, Chen examines the origins, rise, and reform of the Cantonese-dominated Chinese diaspora in Canada between 1788 and 1898. Combining a diasporic approach with both qualitative and quantitative analyses of Chinese and English documents, including previously untapped archival records of secret societies, community organizations, and family businesses, this book reveals the…
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