Magic Seeds: A Novel by V.S. Naipaul [in AsianWeek]
Nobel Prize-winner Naipaul continues Willie Chandran’s life story from Half a Life. After 18 years in Africa, Chandran is in Berlin with his more capable sister but ends up in India as...
Nobel Prize-winner Naipaul continues Willie Chandran’s life story from Half a Life. After 18 years in Africa, Chandran is in Berlin with his more capable sister but ends up in India as...
Liu, a genetic scientist, arrives to visit her husband, Li, at his job site at the famed (or should that be infamous?) Three Gorges Dam Project...
From the author of Red Sorghum comes a monumental novel that follows 20th-century China through the lives of the eponymous woman and her nine children, none of them...
While English is not the native tongue of Saigon-born Dinh, his mastery of his adopted language is undeniable. Throughout this most eclectic collection of shorts – some beyond short, including one-sentence stories...
Through three generations of strong, independent women, Ariyoshi captures and conveys the tumultuous period of Japan from the stratified, socially constrictive end of the 19th century to the modern postwar era of the 20th. Review:...
Genius Han Ong: The Outsider American Han Ong, who made international headlines as one of the MacArthur Foundation’s elite Genius Grant recipients of 1997, refers to his second novel, The Disinherited, as his “imagined homecoming”...
Joyce Carol Oates’ Scariest People: The world premiere of The Tattooed Girl at Theater J “People think I’m prolific,” laughs Joyce Carol Oates, “but actually I work long hours and I’m very patient and fastidious.”...
A haunting, lovingly illustrated story, told from the point of view of a basket that serves three generations of a Nepali family. As the basket's frail, aged owner is about to be left on...
A collection of five tales, starring different birds, including a quail tale from Sri Lanka about the power of prayer and a swan story from China about lost-and-found ancestors. Review: <a...
Perfect timing as the holiday season goes into high gear: What better way to survive the stress and mess than to strengthen the body and calm the mind with yoga? As a...
Written by the son of Aikido’s founder, Morihei Ueshiba, this volume is part history, part philosophy, part how-to … not to mention a catalog of some great action shots of flying, flipping-over...
A touching, slim coming-of-age novel about young Maya who travels one summer to Chennai, India, with her mother. Both mother and daughter are still stinging from a year-old divorce. There in the folds of...
Maya Mehra, 30 and still living with her parents, gets kidnapped at LAX where she’s gone to pick up her unknown prospective husband. When she comes to, she is told that she’s...
The collected private writings of film and cultural historian Donald Richie, who is perhaps best known as Japan’s pre-eminent 20th-century American expat. Included in the multiple pages devoted to his almost-six-decade love affair with...
The final installation in Mehta’s 11-title series, Continents of Exile, explores his father’s love affair with another woman, documented through their love letters – the eponymous Red Letters. Written without judgment following the deaths...
Devi’s failed suicide attempt sends her back home to her parents, where she refuses to speak but decides to cook. Before she can regain her voice – as she becomes...
First and foremost: This is one of the best books I’ve read this year in spite of the historical improbability laid out at the novel’s end. Ayoshi, a woman artist in 1869 Japan, paints in order...
An intimate memoir about a three-decade relationship between the Dalai Lama and the author Chan that begins with high-pitched giggles over Chan’s Fu Manchu-style mustache and ends with the gift of a...
With Hollywood’s latest creative raids into the East (Ringu/The Ring, Ju-on/The Grudge, My Sassy Girl being remade with Rachel Leigh Cook and directed by Bend It Like Beckham’s...
The first-ever comprehensive anthology in the West of Indian writing, represented in prose, poems, and memoirs by 38 writers from the 1850s to the 1990s. Review: <a...