China’s rise to global prominence is a pretty good contender for the most important world development in the past 30 years. But now the question is how Beijing managed to be successful on the international stage, let alone how large that success is—with fierce debates between hawks and doves in the West and elsewhere.
Ranjan Adiga’s debut collection Leech and other stories comprises 10 short stories based around the experiences of Nepalis adapting to new worlds, lands and experiences. The majority relate to migration, both internal, with migrants from rural Nepal traveling to try make it in the capital, or abroad, in search of their dream life in America. It is unsurprising that a nation shaped by migration should produce a writer who tackles the subject with such nuance and tenderness.
Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes a figure of interest in himself—detective figures have been, traditionally if less so at present, more often than not, men—a complex personality whose story is interesting and deserves an independent treatment of its own. It is a genre that solves problems, finds answers, holds the culprit accountable: all very attractive attributes for those who just like a good story.
2014, Seoul, South Korea. The Sewol sinks. Russia takes Crimea. A novel flu threatens to turn the world upside down. Nunmaker, expatriate American, is fired without cause from one of three jobs. His wife, Ha, leaves him, but he doesn’t realize it until movers come for her piano.
In 2015, author Sanya Rushdi was hospitalized after her third psychotic episode and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospital, first published in 2019 in Bengali and then in an excellent recent English translation by Arunava Sinha, is an attempt to make sense of what had happened to her and the things around her during that period of time. This is not however a straight-up memoir but rather a work of auto-fiction. While most characters might share names and trajectories of their real-life counterparts, it would be wrong to read it as an unvarnished factual account of true events.
Scènes de la vie de bohème is an intimate dramatic adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera. Reduced to the four principal roles in a new musical arrangement by Marco Iannelli, this new version is designed to focus on the emotional ties between the two couples. It debuted in April 2024 in a run of special performances on Hong Kong’s iconic Star Ferry in a new production for Dante Alighieri Society and The Peninsula Hong Kong to commemorate the Puccini centenary.
“At least 45,000 years ago, an artist using red ochre painted a mural of warty pigs at the back of a cave near modern-day Makassar on Sulawesi. The artist ‘signed’ the work with hand stencils. The mural is the oldest known representational art associated with modern Homo sapiens anywhere in the world.” This is just one of a multitude of details in Eric C Thompson’s The Story of Southeast Asia that one feels one should have known, but probably didn’t. A rather later one is that the word “Malay” did not originally specify an ethnicity.
In 2022, the US Mint released the first batch of its American Women Quarters series, celebrating the achievements of US women throughout its history. The first set of five included Maya Angelou, Sally Ride… and Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American to ever appear on US currency.
Death is an uncomfortable subject yet in all cultures and societies there are jobs like undertakers and pathologists that deal with it on a daily basis. In the Chinese countryside, funeral cryers are a big part of the way people mourn death. Wenyan Lu’s debut novel, The Funeral Cryer, centers around a middle-aged woman in northeast China who goes into this profession to put food on the table when no one else in her family seems to be able to lift a hand. Lu’s book is a heartwarming story about death, but also life, love and finding hope.
The Solitude of a Shadow is about revenge, and the road to it. Its publication marks Devibharathi’s first novel after decades of novellas, essays, and plays—one of which won last year’s Sahitya Akademi Award. It has now been translated from Tamil by N Kalyan Raman for a wider audience. The story is straightforward: a young boy watched his family suffer at the hands of one man, Karunakaran. As a child, he vowed to make Karunakaran pay, and as an adult, he finds himself in a position to fulfill his promise. But things are never that simple, and the unnamed narrator avoids revenge at all costs. But baser things like plot fall into the background in favor of exploring the transformation of one man, and the result is a puzzle of a novel that the reader must piece together.
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