Even academic books need to be aware of the prevailing zeitgeist. Richard D McBride begins his history of first-millennium Korea with a pop-culture reference to K-Drama.
In the 1920s, amidst the upheaval of the Indian national movement, Mohandas K. Gandhi and the prominent Indian nationalist and feminist, Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, communicated with each other for over a year via letters that were both politically charged and personally insightful.
In 2016, journalist Clare Hammond embarked on a project to study the railways of Myanmar—a transportation network that sprawls the country, rarely used and not shown on many maps, and often used at the pleasure of the country’s military.
Le toréador (1849) is a opéra-comique by Adolphe Adam, a French composer best known for the ballet Giselle. The story is of a ménage–a–trois between an erstwhile soprano, her oft–absent and unfaithful husband, and a previous lover. The work features famous variations on the folk–song Ah! vous dirai–je, maman (better known as Twinkle, twinkle, little star in the English–speaking world).
Tracy O’Neill was adopted from South Korea in the 1980s and never thought to search for her birth mother until 2020 when the world seemed to stop. She had just landed a tenure-track position at Vassar and had broken up with a long-term boyfriend. With more time on her hands—teaching online and not leaving her new apartment much—she had the desire to find her birth mother in Korea. The story of her search, discovery and meeting her mother is the subject of her third book, Woman of Interest. This is hardly the first adoption memoir, but O’Neill is a writer of some pedigree with a couple of novels under her belt, which perhaps explains why her memoir at times reads like a thriller and does so right at the beginning.
Long unavailable, Rohit Manchanda’s newly reissued A Speck of Coal Dust won the Betty Trask Award when it was first published (under a different titles) a generation ago. It takes place in the kingdom of childhood, not however to be confused with that of innocence. In this world, everything can be—and is meant to be—explored and experienced. A flower cannot be marvelled at; it must be touched. A snake cannot be avoided; it must be prodded. The result is a bildungsroman that is starkly refreshing, adding depth to a period and place relatively ignored in literature.
“Historians are stuck with the evidence, novelists can describe what actually happened,” says the French writer, Jean-Félix de la Ville Beaugé. In Firestorm in Paradise, historian Rana Safvi switches roles from the constraints of the former to the imagination of the latter. In her history of Mughal Delhi, Shahjahanabad, published in 2019, she meticulously retraces the topography of the city, uncovering remains of their long-forgotten kiosks and gardens. Now as a novelist, she populates those stone remnants with people, smells, songs and sights, bringing back life as it must have been to Old Delhi.
Hebrew is unique, an ancient tongue that was all but lost for millennia as a spoken language, but was revitalized in the late 19th century and is now the official language of Israel, a country of nine million. Despite this relatively small number of native speakers, Hebrew literature is robust, yet Hebrew literature in English translation remains rare. So it’s unusual to see two new poetry collections come out around the same time. A Winding Line: Three Hebrew Poets by Maya Bejerano, Sharron Hass, and Anat Zecharia, translated by Tsipi Keller and So Many Things are Yours by Admiel Kosman, translated by Lisa Katz include a unique combination of poems that borrow from Old Testament stories and contemporary Israeli life, including politics.
In the wake of anticolonial struggles and amid the two world wars, twentieth-century Southeast Asia churned with new political, cultural, and intellectual realities. Liberal democracies flourished briefly, only to be discarded for dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes as the disorder and inefficiencies inherent to democracy appeared unequal to postcolonial and Cold War challenges. Uniquely within the region, Laos maintained a stable democracy until 1975, surviving wars, coups, and revolutions. But Lao history during this period has often been flattened, subsumed within the tug-of-war between the global superpowers and their puppets.
Almost a hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published an Hercule Poirot mystery, Death in the Air, which takes place on a flight from Paris to London. It may not be her most famous, but debut author Ram Murali has recycled the title for his whodunnit set mainly in the foothills of the Himalayas near Rishikesh—where the Beatles studied meditation—but also in small parts in London, Paris, and Bermuda.
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