Eating out alone in Korea is not the done thing: minimum orders are often for three or four, and restaurants have an intensely communal atmosphere. Some coffee shops and restaurants have installed giant plush Moomins, Pengsoos and other characters so that solo drinkers won’t feel so alone (this may have inspired the cover of Table…
Tara Isabel Zambrano has published widely in literary journals, mainly stories that center around mothering in one fashion or another, usually set in India or with Indian characters in the diaspora. Now she’s compiled these stories and more in Ruined a Little When We Are Born, which continues with the theme of mothering.
There is a tendency with Osamu Dazai, who in his lifetime struggled with addiction and ultimately committed suicide, to focus on the more overwrought and confessional elements of his prose, hoping to find a mirror of the tragedy of his life in his writings. For his dedicated readers spanning the globe, the relatable elements of…
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), aka “Dukhu Mia” and known as the “rebel poet” of the Bengalis, was born in Churulia, a village in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal. A litterateur, lyricist, revolutionary, communist and freedom fighter, he was declared the national poet of Bangladesh in 1987. These Collected Short Stories are a joint endeavour…
In the opening short story of Ouyang Yu’s short story collection The White Cockatoo Flowers, the main character of the titular story asks himself: “If I were in China now, I would be…” The line sets the stage for a collection of stories that explore what it means to become Australian and the tensions of…
All three of the short pieces included in Asa: The Girl Who Turned into a Pair of Chopsticks by Akutagawa Prize-winning author Natsuko Imamura are stories of escalation—in each, the mundane finds itself quickly replaced by the tragically absurd.
Ranjan Adiga’s debut collection Leech and other stories comprises 10 short stories based around the experiences of Nepalis adapting to new worlds, lands and experiences. The majority relate to migration, both internal, with migrants from rural Nepal traveling to try make it in the capital, or abroad, in search of their dream life in America….
Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes…
Born of a Swiss mother and an Indian father and raised in England, Meira Chand’s novels have been set in Japan, Singapore, and India, and a couple have been adapted for the stage in London and Singapore. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she lived in India. Her recent book, The Pink, White…
Janet Poole, a professor at the University of Toronto, in Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories has translated into English a collection of works by Choe Myong-ik, a writer whom she calls in her introductory essay an “exquisite architect of the short story form”. Following her essay, Poole presents nine stories, five from the…
How is a reviewer, faced with (yet another) excellent short-story collection, supposed to convey to readers a convincing rationale for “why this one?” To note that this author is Kazakh is necessary but insufficient; if diversity alone were the criterion, one would need an entire year to cycle through books from every country, territory and…
If one seeks to characterize “Asian-American writing” as something other than just the ethnicity of the author, one might well land on Gina Chung’s short story collection Green Frog as a sort of case-in-point, if not a model.
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…
Kurdistan + 100 poses a question to contemporary Kurdish writers: Might the Kurds one day have a country to call their own? With 13 stories all set in the year 2046—exactly a century after the first glimmer of Kurdish independence, the short-lived Republic of Mahabad—this book offers a space for new expressions and new possibilities…
Divided into two parts set in Iran and the US respectively, Dare the Sea is a new collection of stories from Iranian-American writer Ali Hosseini. The stories, some of which had previously appeared in Guernica, Antioch Review and Story Quarterly, explore Iran’s landscape, culture and how cataclysmic, socio-political changes have shaped the identity and sense…