The will to survive in the face of unrelenting racism and human cruelty underpins this ultimately uplifting debut novel from short-story writer and essayist Janika Oza. Meticulously researched, the story follows three generations of one family, originally from Gujarat, as they are forced from one continent to another by some of the most terrifying events of the last century. Pirbhai’s peregrination from Gujurat to Uganda in 1898 starts the family’s odyssey.
Sae, former journalist turned a young mother of two in 1992 Seoul, is waiting for her husband, an engineer for a small construction company. He’s late. A neighbor rushes down with the news: a high-rise downtown has collapsed, trapping hundreds inside—the same high-rise that Sae’s husband is working.
The giant reptile Godzilla has spawned a franchise of 38 films (and counting) and even has his own official website. But for all the fun of a rampaging 50m monster (or is he 120m?—he has grown along with Tokyo’s skyline), it’s easy to miss his origins as a powerful metaphor for the consequences of nuclear warfare. Shigeru Kayama’s novellas Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again in Jeffrey Angles’s new translation restore Godzilla’s metaphorical roots.
The story of the British Empire in India is not about battles and conquests alone. There were quite a number of cases in which the East India Company maintained a grip over individual kingdoms through what roughly translates into rule by proxy. This other side of the story of the consolidation of the Empire is that of Residency, the institution that operated through the deputation of a British official, generally an army official, to kingdoms such as Hyderabad, Mysore, Pune and so on.
One of the great works of Chinese literature, Kingdoms in Peril is an epic historical novel charting the five hundred years leading to the unification of the country in 221 BCE under the rule of the legendary First Emperor. Writing some fourteen hundred years later, the Ming-era author Feng Menglong drew on a vast trove of literary and historical documents to compose a gripping narrative account of how China was forged.
The holiday week that starts October in China saw both “Immersive Comic Opera Week” and a recital of soprano Anna Netrebko at the Guangzhou Opera House.
Edo-period Japan was a golden age for commercial literature. A host of new narrative genres cast their gaze across the social landscape, probed the realms of history and the fantastic, and breathed new life into literary tradition. But how to understand the politics of this body of literature remains contested, in part because the defining characteristics of much early modern fiction—formulaicness, reuse of narratives, stock characters, linguistic and intertextual play, and heavy allusion to literary canon—can seem to hold social and political realities at arm’s length.
Although the stories in Paul Yoon’s latest collection range from northern Vermont and the Costa Brava to the Russian Far East, and chronologically from 17th-century Japan to more less the present day, with stops along the way in Tsarist Russia and the Cold War, they all feature protagonists who are Korean in one way or another.
Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist kingdom; Judson was reportedly uncomfortable with the attention.
Although they certainly did trade indirectly via merchants traversing the Silk Road routes across the Asian continent, one of the most fascinating historical what-if tropes is whether ancient Romans and Chinese ever actually met. In Silk Road Centurion, a Roman centurion named Manius is taken prisoner by Asian tribesmen fighting for the Parthians, which leads to an epic quest to gain his freedom and return home.
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