An illuminating portrait of how Shanghai’s Catholic community surged back to life after the Cultural Revolution—and of a Church divided between allegiance to the Vatican and loyalty to the Communist party-state.
It’s a brave step to have a coward as your protagonist but acclaimed author Vivek Shanbhag’s unlikeable creation proves to be a memorable device for exploring power, patriarchy and politics in contemporary India.
The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship—if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994.
By the time Emperor Shōmu’s daughter came to the throne in 749 CE the country’s economy was in ruins, bankrupted by Shōmu’s temple-building projects. Famines and epidemics put an unbearable burden on the peasants. Meanwhile the Buddhist establishment grew stronger and stronger.
Fifteen years have passed between the publication of Hon Lai Chu’s 《缝身》 (“Seam”) and Mending Bodies, its English translation by Jacqueline Leung. Readers who feel those years mark a drift toward dystopia may detect the eerie touch of prophecy in Hon’s writing. Yet she also digs into human problems with neither expiration date nor borders.
It’s not every day one comes across a new novel about Jesus as a social activist, least of all one in translation from Malayalam. So Ministhy S’s recent translation of renowned Indian writer Benyamin’s 2007 novel, The Second Book of Prophets, is unexpected, to say the least. One need not know much about biblical stories or be religious—of any faith or none at all—to understand this story, although readers with some knowledge of the New Testament will be familiar with the characters and the plot. Yet as a novel, it’s engaging and even thrilling.
Best known in Singapore as the writer and performer of the smash-hit comedy album “Why U So like dat?’, Siva Choy was a multi-talented musician, journalist, stand-up comedian, movie actor and teacher. An intimate and revealing new book paints an affectionate portrait of a life filled with pioneering artistic endeavour.
All cities have histories, but some seem to have histories that attract particular interest, or play an outsized role in shaping their character. Tokyo is, perhaps, one such: there are numerous books examining its past (for example: Tokyo Before Tokyo by Timon Screech or Anna Sherman’s The Bells of Old Tokyo) and even a podcasts-cum-walking tour of what remains of the past in the present city.
China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global South.” But there were periods where things seemed a bit rosier. For about a decade, between 1988 and 1998, relations between India and China thawed—and prompted heady predictions of an Asian century.
A midnight phone call can mean one of three things: a wrong number, a robocall or a terrible emergency. When suburban Bostonian, Claire Litvak receives a phone call from someone at the American consulate in Shanghai, it’s of the third variety: her daughter Lindsey is in the hospital on life support after she was hit by a drunk driver.
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