Nepal’s tumultuous political history is the focus of Lok Raj Baral’s latest book, Nepal: From Monarchy to Republic, which charts the country’s journey from its political unification in 1769 to its present status as a federal democratic republic. The veteran author and political scientist charts the seismic shifts that have fundamentally changed Nepal’s politics, society and structure as a state.
The opening story of Eternal Summer of My Homeland, the debut story collection from Singaporean author Agnes Chew, is about grief. Hui Shan loses her mother right before the birth of her first child—and gradually cuts her father out of her life after he refuses to do the traditional things one does to commemorate the death of a family member. Until she learns what her father has actually been doing: Growing a garden, illegally, on Singaporean government land.
In her letter to readers at the beginning of her debut novel, The Storm We Made, Vanessa Chan writes that Malaysian “grandparents love us by not speaking” and goes on to explain that this only pertains to the four years of Japanese occupation during World War II. In every other subject, she writes, Malaysian grandparents do speak and at great lengths. But when it comes to the war, they cannot bring themselves to talk about the horrors from that time.
Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean adoptees’ position as family members did not automatically ensure legal, cultural, or social citizenship. Korean adoptees routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, laws, and regulations, in everyday interactions, or even through media portrayals that render them invisible.
“Perhaps you could call it a stroke of karmic good fortune that I was able to experience a once-in-a-century flood only three and a half months after moving to Chennai.” So opens Yūka Ishii’s The Mud of a Century, winner of the 2017 Akutagawa Prize. The novella’s narrator, a Japanese woman in her mid-late twenties, has found a temporary job teaching Japanese in Chennai (the erstwhile Madras), India to a small class of computer programmers employed by an IT company.
Despite his extraordinary success as a conqueror, the turn of the 15th-century Turco-Mongol leader Tamerlane (or more appropriately Timur or Temür—the English derives from the Persian Temür-i lang, or “Timur the lame”) is usually considered something of an also-ran to the original Mongol empire’s founder Genghis (Chinggis) Khan. But ’twas not always thus: several centuries ago, it was Tamerlane, not his predecessor, that figured in Western culture and thought: a late 16th century play by Christopher Marlowe, Tamberlaine the Great; an opera Tamerlano by George Frideric Handel from 1724; the protagonist in Antonio Vivaldi’s 1735 opera Bajazet. The latter is based on the event that gave Timur much of his currency in the West: his defeat of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid at Ankara in 1402, which arguably postponed the fall of Constantinople by several decades if not a full half-century. But then Timur fades.
Thailand is known internationally as a popular sex tourism destination. Yet, despite its size and reputation, remarkably little research has focused on the country’s sex industry over the past two decades. Based on original ethnographic data and other sources, Sex Tourism in Thailand is an expansive yet nuanced study of diverse sex markets and their moral economies.
In an unnamed coastal city—along a seaside drive—a woman searches for her missing daughter. Watching her is a pregnant woman who will soon give birth to a stillborn child. She’s stuck in a hospital with hallucinations of the death of her best friend, who was last seen buried under bombed buildings. The Singularity is a sweeping look at the generational grief of migration, narrated in a poetic rhythm that moves like an elegy. Written by Balsam Karam—of Iranian and Kurdish roots—in Swedish, The Singularity is now available to a wider audience (via a migration of its own) through Saskia Vogel’s English translation.
In December 1992, Hindu nationalists seize the Babri Masjid mosque and tear it down, proclaiming their wish to build a Hindu temple in its stead. The brazen act of destruction sparks riots throughout the country, particularly in Mumbai, where Muslims and Hindus clash in the streets. An estimated nine hundred people, both Muslim and Hindu, die in the violence.
Over the last thirty years, Shanghai has been demarcated by the two sides of the Pudong River, the almost-futuristic Pudong and the historic Puxi. These two areas inspire the title of Aube Rey Lescure’s impressive debut novel, River East River West, a story of people more complicated and layered than they may first appear, set alternately in the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s, times in which people from around China and abroad moved to Shanghai to reinvent themselves.
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