Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam [in San Francisco Chronicle]
Vincent Lam's first book of fiction, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, comes to the United State an already proven deal. The story collection won Canada's prestigious Giller Prize in 2006, the first time a premiere...
This is a heavy tome, but it’s one of those impressive, erudite, must-have titles for anyone interested in Asian literature or literature in general. The Japanese were writing novels centuries before Don Quixote even chased his...
Forget pastoral countryside and quaint village life – this is post-Tiananmen China in which money rules and reinvention is the answer to survival in a new society defined by unleashed capitalism and greed. Six stories capture...
If I were to make my mother the happiest mother in the world, I’d finish at least one of my PhDs by writing that elusive dissertation on Yoko Tawada and her fantastical, enigmatic, revisionist, ambiguous short...
Four short stories and a longer novella are linked together to create a mosaic of disparate voices that share a visceral longing for a time – and place – forever past. Chu adroitly leads readers through...
Considered to be one of the great writers of 20th-century China since she hit the literary scene in the 1940s with a mighty bang, Chang died in obscurity in Los Angeles in 1995. Recently rediscovered thanks...
Volume 1: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945
Volume 2: From 1945 to the Present
The two volumes together offer the most comprehensive overview of modern Japanese literature available in translation. Capturing the most turbulent period of Japan –...
Reddi’s debut – absolutely one of the best short story collections this year – captures the nuanced, often contradictory lives of multiple generations of the Indian diaspora. From the cranky old judge convinced he has...
For the average American, Tibet is not so much a troubled faraway land, but an ethereal concept marked by the kind face of the Dalai Lama, often in the company of devotee Richard Gere.
“In the West,...
Putting Ruth Ozeki's name on a book's cover is an unconditional guarantee that I will buy that book. And I'm not alone: Ozeki's novels My Year of Meats and All Over Creation have been international successes.
The...

LITEROTICA
Erotica Writer Mary Anne Mohanraj Goes Mainstream with Bodies in Motion: Stories
Over the past eight years, Mary Ann Mohanraj has published 10 books, establishing herself as a master – or should that be mistress? – of...
Although death is prominent in every story, this is one fabulous collection of short stories – even as it’s filled with some of the most desperate, grasping characters this side...
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 slim volume of short stories by Nobel Prize Winner Gao, does not offer linear tales with pithy morals. Instead, it’s an elliptical collection...
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.
Review:
A masterful collection of loosely intertwined short stories from the author of the critically-acclaimed Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila which captures the immigrant life lived in between – not...
A collection of 10 inventive stories that capture a glimpse of contemporary life in a Vietnamese village where the writer, actress, director, and painter Doan Le lived for 30 years...
Clint Eastwood, Summer Love, and Cockfighting
The good news first: Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s family in Thailand is all fine; the tsunami thankfully did not harm them. The other good news: His collection of short stories, Sightseeing, which debuts...