Sushi for Kids: A Children’s Introduction to Japan’s Favorite Food by Kaoru Ono, translated by Peter Howlett and Richard McNamara [in AsianWeek]
An energetic, kid-friendly tour (perfect for curious adults, too!) from a sushi bar to Tsukiji (the world’s largest fish market, located in Tokyo) to the sushi history annals, then back to the...
Adorable tale, invitingly illustrated, that juxtaposes the homeward journeys outside with a little boy’s one last round of toy play just before he goes to bed.
Review:
In the middle of a fierce storm, a wolf and a goat comfort each other in a completely darkened hut against the deafening thunder outside. The unlikely pair get to know one...
In the delightful sequel to
Based on traditional Islamic sources, award-winning children’s book maestro Demi creates a book specifically for children about the life and teachings of Muhammad. The book underscores that Muhammad’s message is the same message the prophets of...
While she may be a bona-fide genius, 11-year-old Millicent Min, who has skipped five grades and is taking a college class for fun, learns that using just the brain does not a whole person...
The third installment in the
In order to sign up for the dancing class at the local recreation center – so it can get government funding – Fiona Cheng has to indicate her race. Being Scottish from...
Having survived the horrors of war in her native Laos and 10 long years of living in a cramped, filthy, and dangerous refugee camp in Thailand, Mai Yang and her grandmother are finally allowed...
Originally banned in China, To Live was the basis for the 1994 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winner of the same name, directed by grandmaster Zhang Yimou. A surprisingly slim volume, To Live tells...
An entertaining ghost story with a twist about a recently divorced television script writer who takes to visiting his parents … except they died tragically in
an accident decades ago, leaving him an orphan from childhood. The...
The yakuza genre, or gangster films, have more or less replaced samurai films in both quantity and popularity in Japan. Schilling, a Japan Times film reviewer since 1989, brings together all the...
A striking, original collection of multi-layered short stories about life caught between the old and modern, between expectations and hopes, between dreams and reality. The opening story, “Gopal’s Kitchen,” is especially poignant about a...
Eleven essays capture almost a half-century of Nobel Prize-winning Naipaul’s literary life. The final essay, “Two Worlds,” which he begins and ends by invoking Proust, is the lecture he gave when accepting the Nobel...
The long-awaited debut novel by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, begins in 1968 with newlyweds-by-arrangement Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli living in Cambridge, Mass. They name their first child Gogol,...
In another British import of a debut novel, Manicka draws from her own history to create a family saga of four generations and 70 years. At the family’s core is its matriarch, Lakshmi, who...
Hong Kingston’s much awaited new book begins with the calamitous fires in the Oakland-Berkeley hills of October 1991 that strike as she is driving home from her father’s funeral –...
Capturing her rollicking journey through India’s phenomenal Bollywood industry, journalist Hardy recounts the glitz and glitter of stars, their starlets, directors and various groupies as she searches for elusive pretty-boy, mega heartthrob Hrithik Roshan.
Review:...
What might be considered a companion collection to
A runaway bestseller in its native Britain and quickly climbing the charts on this side of the pond, Ali’s assured debut novel follows the life of Bangladeshi-born Nazneen, who arrives at age 18 in...