The Indian epic Mahabharata continues to inspire novelists to retell the story of the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the cousins who fight over the kingdom of Hastinapur, especially from the points of view of the women characters who have been wronged. Many of these retellings—including Ira Mukhoty’s Song of Draupadi reviewed in the Asian Review of Books—narrate the battle and the politics from the points of view of the wronged women: the epic is full of awful stories about women being abducted so that they can be married to the prince of Hastinapur, or tricked into marrying the blind king Dhritarashtra or gambled away by her husband(s).
Izumi Suzuki was a Japanese science fiction writer of the 1970s and early 1980s with two collections of short stories currently available in English—Terminal Boredom and Hit Parade of Tears. Both are the collaborative work of several translators, and both were widely lauded for their innovation and biting social commentary. When I reviewed Terminal Boredom for the Asian Review of Books, I noted that, “Suzuki’s feminist spirit is as relevant and her stories as piercing today as they were more than thirty years ago.”
A 2024 round-up of reviews of 75 works in translation from Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Thai through Bengali, Sanskrit and Urdu to Sumerian, Arabic and French: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, children’s books and classics.
Debut author Kim Jiyun majored in creative writing at university, later studied television screenwriting, and found inspiration for her first novel in an unlikely place: a neighborhood laundromat. It’s paid off. Yeonnam-Dong’s Smiley Laundromat has become a bestseller in Korea and now it’s been translated into English by Shanna Tan, a prolific translator based in Singapore who works in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
Many authors have written about the Manila Galleons, the massive ships that took goods back and forth between Acapulco and Manila, ferrying silver one way, and Chinese-made goods the other. But how did the Galleons actually work? Who paid for them? How did buyers and sellers negotiate with each other? Who set the rules? Why on earth did the shippers decide to send just one galleon a year?
2024 was another bumper year of Asian Review of Books / New Books Network podcasts. Here is a selection of a dozen highlights from short stories and pop-classics in translation to biography, history, society and the arts. Click on the speaker to hear the podcast … or download (and subscribe!) from your favorite podcast app.
This entirely subjective list of 50 highlights from 2024 include reviews of fiction, literature, poetry and non-fiction. Translations remained strong in this year’s list, including literature, poetry and non-fiction, ranging from Chinese, Korean and Japanese, through Thai, Tagalog and Vietnamese to Kazakh, Bengali, Telegu, Arabic, Russian and French. Non-fiction entries ranges from history, biography and memoir to art, photograpy and culture.
In Myanmar today, resistance against the 2021 coup and the military regime, has spread across the entire country, and fighting has engulfed the state, displacing millions and leaving the country in a state of turmoil. To explain how we got to this point, and what is the future for both the resistance movement and the Myanmar military, veteran journalist Bertil Lintner provides in The Golden Land Ablaze a detailed background of Myanmar’s political development since Independence in 1948. Over six chapters, Bertil analyzes the coup itself, the military, ethnic politics, the role of China, Myanmar’s politicians and finishes with an overview of the situation today and predictions for future developments.
How, as we ask every year, did Asia fare in the “Best Books” lists of 2024? As before, this list takes a broad view of what constitutes an “Asian” book. Click on the title for our review and listen to the podcast where listed.
The modern classics of Southeast Asian literature, with the singular exception of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, largely remain a blank spot on the English-language literary map. Thank goodness, then, that Penguin Southeast Asia has in recent years published translations from, for example, Vietnamese and Tagalog; Pauline Fan’s recent translation of a collection of Malay short fiction by the iconic writer Fatimah Busu is a welcome addition.
You must be logged in to post a comment.