Hardboiled & Hard Luck by Banana Yoshimoto, translated by Michael Emmerich [in AsianWeek]
04 Aug, by in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation
Two novellas about women on the verge of change: in Hardboiled, a woman hiking in remote mountains realizes it’s the anniversary of her ex-lover’s death and overnights with a ghost,...
Nineteen years after her twin’s unsolved disappearance, Mara Dunn finds her sister’s camera in a junk sale. Its final roll of film – of rare orchids – offers a definitive path of clues. With...
Here the connecting thread is that of place: a changing, bustling Bangalore at the core of fabulous stories about a man who falls in love too late with the wrong woman, an old man...
This one is just delicious – and delightfully plotted as to how it plays with time and place and people. The beginning: a man, a woman,...
This slim volume of short stories by Nobel Prize Winner Gao, does not offer linear tales with pithy morals. Instead, it’s an elliptical collection...
A pseudonymously penned mystery thriller from the chronicler of the early Filipino American experience, this "lost" work ironically follows the lives of three non-Filipinos. Nevertheless, Hau and Anderson establish the work as...
Innocence lost: 17-year-old Ami is both schoolgirl and prostitute, pregnant by her mentally challenged older brother, brutally gang raped by a rock star and his groupies, but capable of restoring the dormant virility of...
If this 120-page novel rife with sex and violence were any longer, reading it would be unbearable. That it won Japan’s highest literary honor, the Akutagawa Prize, for its then 20-year-old author,...
All in the Name of Love in Xinran’s ‘Sky Burial’
Here’s the story: two lovers, marriage, and cruel separation by war shortly thereafter. The husband dies mysteriously, but the wife remains skeptical and embarks on...
A varied collection of elliptical poems from Tsering, possibly the only Tibetan American writer publishing regularly. Her words, her images, her memories seem to weave together to reinvent and reconstruct...
A beautifully produced collection of intertwined poems that have more margin than print – although it’s the sparseness, that which is not written, that lingers.
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Five fascinating Japanese women artists – Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Shigeko Kubato – left the conservative art world in their native Japan for New York. And if you can...
The title, Hua Song, means “in praise of the Chinese community.” Undoubtedly, the remarkable book is a beautifully rendered, bilingual record of Chinese communities throughout the world, past and present.
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From one of my favorite writers comes a highly readable memoir of a seed-collecting trek through eastern Nepal with three botanist friends. As always, Kincaid is blunt, honest, and highly observant, never overlooking her...
THE perfect travel companion, filled with some of the very best writers of the international South Asian diaspora, from Jhumpa Lahiri to Rohinton Mistry to Michael Ondaatje.
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WOW. Here’s a white man’s exploration of race in America and his humble, blunt, sometimes even unknowingly racist attempts to be anti-racist even as he is part of the privileged majority.
Review: <a...
Published under a pseudonym because of its autobiographical nature, this hoping-to-be controversial novel recounts the erotic maturation of a young Muslim woman. She’s married off at 17 to an older man who brutalizes her under familial...
The long-awaited follow-up to the provocative 
America – home of the best minds in the world? As Florida challenges, take a hard look at the 21st-century United States: That position of leadership is anything...
Local Bay Area author recounts the inspiring life stories of 21 South Asian American women scattered around the country.
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