In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her, she looks deeply at the knotted side, to explore the complex stories of their origins. Through both picture and pattern she teases out the history of these carpets, which, she argues, can reveal much about the history of our world.
In 2023, University of Minnesota Press released a translation of Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. The two novellas (published as one volume with a thorough explanatory afterword by translator Jeffrey Angles) add the often-forgotten backstory to one of the world’s most iconic monster movies, often credited solely to the imaginations of director Ishiro Honda and special effects visionary Eiji Tsubaraya. In reality, science fiction author Shigeru Kayama wrote the scenario for the film, meaning he created the movie’s “entire foundation… the plot, characters, themes, and structure”. The publisher returns to the tale of another movie monster with The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, again translated by Angles.
It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Industrial Revolution, and not China? And what does that journey tell us about politics and culture?
The Lake of Tears is Veeraporn’s third novel, following The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth and Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat. Unlike those novels, it is her first foray into fiction for young people, yet rather than a departure from her signature style, it feels like a refinement, exploring familiar themes of longing, memory, abandonment, and love through a simpler lens, where the language remains lyrical, the emotions are no less profound, and the narrative retains the surreal, fairy-tale like quality that marks her unique way of writing.
A number of books in English have given us histories of Korean emigration to the United States and Canada, but the story of those who left Korea for Japan in the decades of Japanese imperial rule is relatively unknown. Sayaka Chatani, a professor of history at the National University of Singapore, writes in this book of Korean immigrants and their descendants in Japan who chose after 1948 to support North Korea, despite most of them having roots in South Korea.
Originally published in Japan in 1964, and now translated for the first time into English, Kobo Abe’s The Traitor starts with a writer’s visit to a country town of Akkeshi. There he learns from an innkeeper, Fukuchi, the story of three hundred convicts who escaped into Hokkaido after the end of the brief Boshin War, a power struggle between the Meiji Emperor and the Tokugawa Shogunate. These men are followed by Enomoto Takeaki, an officer in search of the convicts. While the framing is fictional, Enomoto is a real historical figure: a leader of the Shogunate faction and later a prominent member of the Meiji government.
The Korean word “han” is difficult to translate precisely into English, but the concept revolves around a profound sadness, regret, resentment and a loss of a collective identity that arises from historical injustice, such as occupation, war, and separation. It is, in other words, a generational trauma with Korean characteristics. Lisa Lee’s debut novel American Han, set during the time of the first tech boom, is anchored in the despair and rancor that defines the Kim family of the San Francisco Bay. Jane Kim is a third year law student at a second tier law school in San Francisco, when her mother relocates to start a new life for herself, an impulse Jane understands.
The art historian Ernst Gombrich once observed that in Chinese landscape painting, the aim is not to reproduce the appearance of things, but to convey the rhythm and spirit of nature. Among genres of traditional Chinese art, landscape painting is widely regarded as a central tradition and admired for its qualities beyond the aesthetics, with the capacity for conveying lofty ideas and cultural meanings. To many artists, Chinese landscape painting is not merely a literal depiction of a specific place but represents an idealized vision of their environments shaped by their imagination and individualized understanding of nature. Chinese landscape paintings thus bear meanings beyond the physical realm, elevating the viewer towards spiritual and intellectual awakenings.
Jackson Alone is a singularly unique novel that subverts expectations with a cast of characters who are each vividly imagined, performing confusing and surreal acts in a Twilight Zone ethereality. Written by Jose Ando—a winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize—and translated by Kalau Almony—known for his translations of unique and intense stories—Jackson Alone is a slim novel that gut-punches weirdness.
Karan Mahajan’s ambitious third novel, The Complex, spans roughly fifteen years of Indian family life, from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It charts the Chopra clan of Modern Colony, North Delhi, through the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the rise of the BJP and the Mandal Commission agitation against caste-based affirmative action. It is a serious, carefully constructed novel, yet also, at times, a genuinely exhausting one.
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