“And he gathered them together in a place called in the Hebrew tongue Armageddon” (Revelation 16:16). Armageddon. The word sends shivers up the spine; it’s the place where, according to the imaginative interpretation of some, the final battle between the forces of good and evil will be fought. It’s mentioned twelve times in the Old Testament and once only in the New, quoted above.
It is impossible not to read title of Mieko Kawakami’s new novel Breasts and Eggs, with its unabashedly female take, without also hearing the the salacious and near homonymous “breasts and legs”, invoking as it does the male gaze and its frequent targets. Kawakami’s work, composed of two “books” separated by 10 years, is an extended exploration of the inner life of women; the theme of breasts appear as one character pursues augmentation surgery, and eggs are a recurring motif both as a foodstuff and in relation to fertility and procreation.
Cambodian-American poet Monica Sok recalls transgeneration trauma in her debut collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On. Born in Pennsylvania to parents who have sought refuge in the United States, Sok retraces the contours of a difficult and important conversation on identity. She succeeds in using her Americanness to question her sense of belonging in the Cambodian narrative, while inviting the reader in two countries’ complex political history.
Nora Watts is on the run from the very man she’s trying to hunt down. With an ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese villain as protagonist and partially set on the Indonesian island of Lombok, Sheena Kamal’s third book in her Nora Watts thriller series, No Going Back, tells the story of a half-Palestinian/half-indigenous Canadian trying to save her teenage daughter from the man who is after both women.
Too many stories can spell trouble, and not just from the here and now. The medieval Sanskrit story collection known as Kathasaritsagara—“The Ocean of the Stream of Stories”—is filled with stories, spilling into other stories, seeping around each other, sucking you down into another story.
The title of Roberto Carmack’s book is a bit misleading, as is the book’s cover, which shows two helmeted and uniformed soldiers in battle. The book is part of the Modern War Studies series, but its focus is on the administrative, institutional and ideological aspects of war in the Kazakh Republic of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. It is more sociology than military history.
University student Miwako Sumida has committed suicide and her small group of friends are caught completely off guard, yet determined to search for answers behind her death. Set mainly in Tokyo, Indonesian-born Clarissa Goenawan’s second novel, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, is a haunting story of friendship in young adulthood and how—even before social media—people are not often as they appear.
Growing up in the United States can leave one with a curious idea of history. Revolutions are about independence, civil wars are about countries splitting apart, and colonies are about colonists. So what kind of a “colony” was, say, India?
India has suffered much from stereotyping, particularly at the hands of Western historians. It has been dismissed as being almost stagnant until Western encroachments somehow woke it up, and it’s been regarded as isolated from surrounding territories, somehow evolving on its own first as “a self-generated Hindu and Sanskritic civilization”, as Richard M Eaton puts it in this new book. From 1000 to 1800 CE historical convention labels this time-span “the Muslim period”, although the inhabitants of India habitually referred to their conquerors not as Muslims but “Turks”, an ethnographical term rather than a religious one. Eaton notes that in the case of Central and South America, historians usually refer to the “Spanish” (or Portuguese) conquest, rather than the “Christian” conquest, and he rightly wonders why this should be the case, since forced conversion of native populations was almost as important as gold and silver.
The country is made up almost entirely of immigrants, yet the United States goes through decades-long bouts of antipathy toward them. Journalist Jia Lynn Yang’s family emigrated to the United States from Taiwan in 1976; it wasn’t until much later that she learned her family had benefited from a US policy only a decade old when her parents applied for visas. Interested in the change in policy, she set out to research US immigration law during the period when it was restricted the most. Her new book, One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965, tells the fascinating story of how these immigration restrictions came to be and why they were relaxed after four decades.
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