For much of the past three months, the northeastern Indian state of Manipur—nestled right up against the border with Myanmar—has been the site of a conflict between two groups: the majority Meiteis and the minority Kukis. The fighting—with scenes of brutal violence, looting of police stations, and burnt places of worship—even sparked a motion of no confidence against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
An unnamed narrator who lives in Germany working as a copywriter for an asparagus company attends a concert with her roommate without being particularly interested, guided only by the temptation of free tickets. Here, she sees the “pack of boys”, the term used to refer to the Korean boy band around which her life will soon revolve. Each of the boys is undeniably beautiful, angelic, and have celestial names, such as “Moon”, “Mercury”, “Sun”, and “Venus”. In her descriptions of sold-out world tours and fans that burst into tears as soon as they see the boys, it’s tempting to try to match these characters to real bands. But everything about them, and the world that Esther Yi has created, is too weird and unsettling to be mistaken for real life.
Empire or nation-state? This question has driven much argument in Chinese academic circles. These arguments take more than one form, however. The political view of China as a nation-state has focused very much on the question of sovereignty and international relations. But there is also a claim about Chinese culture and national identity: the question of what China is vis-à-vis what it means to be Chinese.
Offered the chance to run his twin brother’s A.I. company, Anthony Wilson ditches his failing screenwriting career to start anew in Macau. The job turns highly lucrative when Anthony’s new client, Cash Cheang, a pompadour-topped and Johnny Cash-loving casino operator, hands him a bag full of cold hard Yuan to implement a facial recognition system in his casino.
When they meet, more like run into each other, on the Trans-Siberian just past Krasnoyarsk, Aliocha and Hélène are both trying to escape: he from the draft, she from a boyfriend. Aliocha, hardly more than a boy, is in a group of conscripts being sent to camp in Siberia; intending to desert, he tries and fails to sneak off the train at Krasnoyarsk.
In the opening story of Saras Manickam’s collection, My Mother Pattu, a sixteen year-old Tamil girl named Meena is sent from her home in Penang, Malaysia to live with an aunt and uncle in Mambang, an inland town halfway to Kuala Lumpur. Her crime: writing and receiving letters from a boy at school. This story, “Number One, Mambang Lane”, sets the tone for the collection with colorful Malaysian settings and characters that exemplify Malaysia’s diverse cultures, racial issues and all.
When Robert Clive, the man who established Company rule in India was hauled in front of Parliament to answer for crimes of corruption, he allegedly responded by saying, essentially, he could have been worse.
You would never associate tree climbing goats or Fengshui with Investment Banking… Banking with Chopsticks will change your mind about the world of finance. The book is a personal insight into the world of banking and various cultures, with a focus on China and Japan and a sense of humor. The book begins in London in 1986, the year of the Big Bang, and ends in Geneva with the latest financial crisis of 2008.
When a group of junior high school students in China unwittingly film a murder, instead of turning the footage over to the authorities, they devise a scheme to extort money from the killer. These aren’t just any kids, they are Zhu Chaoyang, Ding Hao, and Pupa—the titular Bad Kids of Zijin Chen’s recently translated thriller.
Siddhartha Deb’s The Light at the End of the World is a massive novel filled with conspiracies, uncertainty, madness and marvels, the inability to process the wide array of what is noticed and reported, and, indeed, what counts as reality. Here is the world, specifically India, except it isn’t. As one character responds in a quasi-interrogation to her alleged “betrayal” of India: “India is not a nation but a prisonhouse [sic] of possible nations.” As with India, so goes the world.
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