Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour has become a milestone in Chinese economic history. Historians and commentators credit Deng’s visit to Guangzhou Province for reinvigorating China’s market reforms in the years following 1989—leading to the Chinese economic powerhouse we see today. Journalist Jonathan Chatwin follows Deng’s journey in The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future.
How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? And how did these contribute to the making of Goan identity?
Although subtitled “Family Fortunes” and presented as being the story of the Jhaveri business family in Gujarat, Sudev Sheth’s recent history Bankrolling Empire is as much, if not more, about the wider arc of the decline of the Mughal Empire. Whether one is interested in the specific role of finance in the Mughal Empire or the jigsaw puzzle that is Mughal history, one is likely to come away from this well-written and colorful book quite the wiser.
Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, there is a small village with “a golden four-lane highway near it but not a single tamarind tree.” Here, the novel’s unnamed narrator spends his days loitering around town and smoking cigarettes. This routine—and everything about life as he knows it—changes with the arrival of Kamala, a widowed mother, a schoolteacher, and the future object of his obsession. She & I, written by Imayam in Tamil and translated by D Venkataramanan, follows these two characters over a decade to tell a powerful story about obsession, self-destruction, and the violence of unrequited desire through vignettes and spare prose.
Therapist Haesoo Lim used to appear on television to provide her professional opinion on matters in the news. But after speaking about a famous male actor, her career took a nosedive when the actor committed suicide. Haesoo not only lost her job, but her marriage also fell apart. Kim Hye-jin’s new novel Counsel Culture, translated by Jamie Chang, may be a small, contemplative book, but it packs a big punch with vibrant characters, both human and feline.
Set in the metropolis of Kolkata, A House of Rain and Snow describes the struggle of a section of middle-class Bengali society to cope with the effects of globalization during the early 1990s. It tells of their passion for art and culture, which too was affected by changing times. The author, Srijato, an eminent Bengali poet and lyricist, is known for his Anando Purskar-winning poetry collection Udanto Swab Joker: All Those Flying Jokers, just one of his many well-known books of poetry.
In his Akutagawa Prize-winning Cannibals, Shinya Tanaka doesn’t shy away from dark topics, dealing with crippling poverty, violence and sexual abuse in an often matter-of-fact way. Perhaps the author’s candor is part of the reason that Cannibals (a literal translation of the original Tomogui, though the original has a secondary meaning of ‘mutual destruction’) received Japan’s most prestigious literary prize, although it often walks such a fine line between the frank and the gratuitous that readers themselves may settle on either side in their own assessment.
Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the colonial era (published from 1936 to 1941) and four in the postwar period (published from 1946 to 1952). Apart from “Walking in the Rain”, which she published in a bilingual edition in 2015, the stories in this book are available in English for the first time.
The Middle East remains one of the world’s most complicated, thorny—and, uncharitably, unstable—parts of the world, as countless headlines make clear. Internal strife, regional competition and external interventions have been the region’s history for the past several decades.
The historical and territorial space of Punjab has been politically and spatially unstable and changing, What Punjab means to different people also varies over time and context. Equally, what one holds dear about Punjab, the sense of “Punjabiyat/Punjabiness”, is both emotionally and culturally complex.
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