Although it is the Silk Road that captures most of the contemporary attention and discussion, it was in fact spices, not silk, that drove Western Europeans to seek routes to Asia. “Lightweight and durable, spices” writes Roger Crowley in his new history (appropriately entitled Spice), “were the first truly global commodity … they could be…
“At least 45,000 years ago, an artist using red ochre painted a mural of warty pigs at the back of a cave near modern-day Makassar on Sulawesi. The artist ‘signed’ the work with hand stencils. The mural is the oldest known representational art associated with modern Homo sapiens anywhere in the world.” This is just…
The Glass Islands: A Year in Lombok chronicles Australian Mark Heyward’s triumphs and struggles in building a house on the Indonesian island directly east of Bali. The idea behind the title is that the islands of Indonesia are opaque and don’t reveal their troubled histories apart from in the odd transparent, or glass-like, moment.
As Comet Hyakutake passes Earth in March 1996, four friends experience an array of puzzling events: the dead reappear and the living disappear. Daryl Qilin Yam’s Lovelier, Lonelier begins in Kyoto, where the paths of Isaac Neo, Tori Yamamoto, Jing Aw and Mateo Calvo Morales first intersect, and where the trajectory of their lives change…
From the temples of Angkor Wat and Borobudur to images of Ganesh and references to the Ramayana, anyone who visits Southeast Asia cannot fail to be struck by the influence of centuries-old Indian culture, an influence that seems more profound and deeply rooted than that of China. Yet in today’s Southeast Asia, the situation is…
Modern Singapore is the city in a garden, a biophilic and highly managed urban space that is home to a variety of animals, from mosquitoes to humans to polar bears. How has this coexistence worked as we enter the Anthropocene? How have human-animal relationships shaped Singapore society—socially, economically, politically and environmentally—over the last half century?
It’s the first day of a new school year and friends Pangolin and Slow Loris make their way along a jungle trail to meet their new teacher. They reminisce about the summer—Pangolin recalls an anthill exploding with larvae and eggs—before Mrs. Bat flies into the classroom to introduce herself.
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…
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…
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…
T his time last year, Penguin Southeast Asia released Amado V Hernandez’s first novel The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit), a classic of modern Filipino literature that had somehow more or less missed the attention of international publishers up to that point. This has been followed, in just the space of just twelve months, with…
In 1921, Somerset Maugham and his partner Gerald Haxton traveled throughout Asia, which included a sojourn in Penang. Maugham gathered personal stories from people he met in Malaya that would inspire his fictional work, The Casuarina Tree, a collection of six stories published in 1926.
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.
In a story in Agnes Chew’s impressive debut collection, Eternal Summer of My Homeland, a Singaporean woman named Nadine gets to know a German man and speaks to him about love, mortality, and philosophy. Mortality seems to be a theme throughout the collection of stories about regular people in Singapore. There’s nothing Crazy Rich about…
From 1975 to 1979, while Cambodia was ruled by the brutal Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) regime, torture, starvation, rape, and forced labor contributed to the death of at least a fifth of the country’s population. Despite the severity of these abuses, civil war and international interference prevented investigation until 2004, when protracted negotiations…
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