The title of novelist Dara Horn’s new collection of essays, People Love Dead Jews: Reports From A Haunted Present, says it all and hints at Horn’s thesis that stories about Jews which receive the most traction are ones in which we are dead.
When Kat Chow was a girl, her mother once joked about being preserved by taxidermy after she dies so that her family will still have her around. Not long after, she succumbs to cancer, leaving grief in her wake. Grief pervades the immigrant story of Kat Chow’s new memoir, Seeing Ghosts. Although most of the…
In 1910, Manchuria suffered a terrible epidemic that killed tens of thousands of people in a matter of months. Although the 1918 flu pandemic has taken most of the spotlight when it comes to super spreaders a hundred years ago, HY Yeang writes about the Manchurian pneumonic plague in his debut novel, Blue Sky Mansion.
It’s 1981 and Alma Rosen is a thirteen year-old living in New York City’s East Village. She’s mourning the loss of Grandma Miriam, her paternal grandmother who passed away a few years ago and to whom she was very close. Her parents don’t get along and she’s worried her family is going to further splinter…
Australian broadcast journalist Mimi Kwa comes from a lineage going back to imperial Beijing. In her new family memoir, House of Kwa, she tells the remarkable story that brought her father’s family to Southern China, Hong Kong, and Western Australia.
Anne Liu Kellor’s mother was born in Chongqing during World War II, moved around mainland China during the civil war, and fled to Hong Kong with her family in 1950 before settling in Taiwan. Kellor herself grew up in Seattle in a mixed race household. Her Chinese grandmother helped raise her, keeping her hearing and…
In computer engineering, an edge case occurs when someone is writing code and accidentally misses something small, but crucial, that eludes bug-testing. YZ Chin’s new novel, Edge Case, centers around a young Malaysian woman named Edwina who works at a start-up in Manhattan and is in charge of investigating edge cases. But when her husband,…
The trailing spouse has been a perennial subject of memoirs and novels, usually involving women who find their way after some ups and downs. Marcie Maxfield centers her new novel, Em’s Awful Good Fortune, on what she calls the tagalong wife, addressing this topic—one with which she apparently has considerable personal experience—with a combination of…
“The Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” was published in The New Yorker in early 2020, generating great interest for Anthony Veasna So’s forthcoming collection of stories, Afterparties. But months before his book came out, So died suddenly from an overdose. “The Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” kicks off this collection and tries to answer a…
Tianjin has always seemed to play second fiddle to the more prominent Beijing. By the same token, during the late-Qing and Republican periods, Shanghai has been held up as China’s most cosmopolitan city, attracting people from around the world. Elizabeth LaCouture, in her new book, Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin,…
Alexander McCall Smith, of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency fame, has moved, literarily if not literally, from Africa and Scotland to Sri Lanka. He has placed the story of his latest novel The Pavilion in the Clouds, on the grounds of a tea plantation in colonial Ceylon.
Comics in Thailand have enjoyed a long and rich history and have been enjoyed by people of all socio-economic classes, even though they’ve had a reputation as a form of “low culture”. In The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes, Nicolas Verstappen goes back even further than a hundred years to…
Winnie Nguyen moves to Saigon in 2010 to teach English, but also to become a more resilient, stronger version of her biracial American self. Early in Violet Kupersmith’s new novel, Build Your House Around My Body, Winnie spots a banyan tree outside an old temple in Saigon and hopes she, too, can become like a…
Moïse de Camondo came from one of the most prominent Jewish families in 19th-century Constantinople, but in 1869 at the age of nine he moved with his family to a new promised land for Jews: Paris. At the conclusion of the French Revolution almost a century earlier, France became the only nation in Europe to…
It was perhaps inevitable that Chinese memoirs in translation would move on from those whose authors date from the Chinese Civil War and the Cultural Revolution. Cai Chongda is a popular millennial writer and fashion executive who became the youngest editorial director in the GQ franchise. His memoir, Vessel, was a bestseller in China a…