In both English and Chinese, the term warlord, or junfa, immediately conjures the image of a rapacious strongman, violent and reactionary. The territorial aggrandizement of these military men nipped Chinese democracy in the bud, contributing to the fragmentation and instability of the Republican period (1912-1949). But the warlords who vied for power after the final dynasty’s collapse were also husbands, fathers, and friends. By centering the women in their lives, Kate Merkel-Hess’s Women and Their Warlords: Domesticating Militarism in Modern China, revisits the history and memory of a dynamic era and highlights the political valences of intimate relationships.
In 1930, a Filipino immigrant named Fermin Tobera was shot and killed by white men in Watsonville, California, an all-too-common and mostly unpunished hate crime in the US at a time when they weren’t even labeled as such. Randy Ribay uses this period and this murder as the starting point in his new young adult novel Everything We Never Had, which spans four generations of teenage boys in the fictional Maghabol family, covering major historical events in Filipino American history, including violence against Asian agricultural workers in California, labor organizing, exiles from the Marcos years, and anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID pandemic.
Anne Anlin Cheng grew up in Taiwan and moved to Savannah, Georgia with her parents and brother as a school-aged girl. Having learned English as her second language, she majored in English literature in college (“to my parents’ horror”), earned a PhD, published books on race and gender, and worked her way up the ladder of the professoriate at Princeton University. Then one day, she lost herself.
Those who have come of age since the 1973 oil embargo should have no great difficulty accepting the outsized importance of the Persian Gulf and the surrounding region. From oil and gas to, more recently, airlines, finance, media and football teams, the countries of the Gulf have influence that far exceeds traditional measurements of power such as population or military capacity. In Center of the World, Allen James Fromherz argues that this importance dates to the dawn of history.
Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media. These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes, a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people, and environmental contamination.
For much of his life, Jay Prosser was uncertain of where he belonged. He was “Jewish and not, British and Asian, Iraqi, English, Welsh, Chinese”. With a military father, his family moved often. At a boarding school, he was dubbed a “half-caste”. At synagogue, he felt like an imposter. Prosser’s memoir, Loving Strangers, tells the story of how he forged a sense of belonging, and a deep appreciation of his multicultural heritage and Jewish faith, through the excavation of a camphorwood chest.
When thinking about the most important World War II generals on the Allied side, the name Hastings Ismay does not come immediately to mind. But it should. Throughout the war, he was Winston Churchill’s right arm, serving as his chief staff officer in the Defense Ministry, Deputy Secretary of the War Cabinet, and as a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. General Ismay accompanied Churchill on his trips to France early in the war, and later accompanied Churchill on summit meetings with other Allied leaders. And he was “instrumental”, writes John Kiszely, a forty-year veteran of the British Army and a visiting professor at King’s College and visiting research fellow at Oxford, in his magnificent new biography of Ismay, “in designing and managing the ‘handling machine’ that converted the Prime Minister’s decisions into action”.
A compilation of reviews in the past twelve months for Women in Translation month (August 2024), including non-fiction and poetry and well as novels, short stories and children’s books. These include translations from Bengali, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Hebrew, Malayalam, Swedish and Vietnamese.
In Indonesia, the colonial past has a conspicuously low profile in public consciousness and political debate, but the national revolution—”Revolusi” in Bahasa Indonesia—that threw off colonial rule once and for all nonetheless remains the single most defining moment in the country’s history. Countless murals, quirky dioramas, annual Independence Day celebrations, place names, monuments, official and unofficial histories celebrate this struggle. Meanwhile, interest in decolonization has grown exponentially, but Indonesia has figured much less in international discussions than cases such as Algeria or India.
Identical and inseparable twin sisters, Roya and Tala live in Tehran. When they fall pregnant around the same time, they dream of going through the same motherhood milestones together and raising their kids together, yet a freak accident destroys these dreams in a matter of moments. This is the backdrop of Nahid Rachlin’s latest novel, Mirage, a psychological thriller that reflects life in contemporary Iran.
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