Rice: A Novel by Su Tong, translated by Howard Goldblatt [in AsianWeek]
Don’t be put off by the tacky cover with the bare chest of a necklaced young man. The story within, with all its rawness and shock, is hard to put down. Five Dragons, an...
Don’t be put off by the tacky cover with the bare chest of a necklaced young man. The story within, with all its rawness and shock, is hard to put down. Five Dragons, an...
In mid-15th-century Japan, Koji, half of a set of identical twins, has the chance to rise above his social status as a farmer’s son and become the apprentice to a revered dye maker. But...
Min's second historical novel reinvents the life of Tzu Hsi, China's last empress. Although positioned in the collective Chinese memory as an evil, ruthless ruler, the Empress Orchid in Min's world is a strong,...
An uncensored glimpse into the suffering lives within a rural Chinese community reeling from the utter violence that haunts the town as a result of a brutal rape, which results in a suicide by hanging, which...
Originally self-published in London by Sri Lankan-born Chandraratna, then becoming a contender for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 1999, Mirage simply tells the heartbreaking story of Sayeed, a quiet man getting on in years...
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...
A slim, must-read collection of powerful essays by the author of the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things that questions everything from nuclear power, the so-called war against terror, and the new imperialism....
A resonating, breathtaking first novel that chronicles the relationship of two boys, born and raised in Kabul, Afghanistan – both motherless, both nursed by the same woman and both lives inextricably linked, even in...
Xinran: The Voice of the Good Women of China The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices is one of those books you just can’t put down. Part memoir, part history, part tragedy, part social documentary, Good Women...
A memorable debut novel (big month for debuts, no?) about the Vietnamese live-in cook for the legendary American expats Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, a young man with a complicated past...
A touching story (and, yes, another debut novel!) about the age-old generation gap, this time set in postcolonial India, focusing on the relationship between Dr. Dam, a veterinary surgeon, and his hapless...
The Creation of Fiction Time for true confessions: When I read Ruth Ozeki's first novel, My Year of Meats, a quirky, rollicking, memorable adventure about a documentary filmmaker who exposes the abuses in...
From the author of the National Book Award-winner, Waiting, another spare, disarming, amazing novel about trying to survive life in post-Mao China. Jian Wan, a graduate student in literature, cares for his hospitalized mentor, a professor,...
A remarkable, gracefully written work based on the true story of the authors’ parents’ early lives: their mother, the privileged daughter of a prominent minister in North Korea, and their...
A fascinating, serpentine tale of a privileged Indian boy who at 15 is thrown out into the streets by the man he thought was his father, and how he becomes a chameleon re-inventor of himself in...
Three generational-saga of a south Indian village family, which begins in 1899 with the patriarch, Solomon Dorai, village headman, and continues through a tumultuous period of political upheavals and changes...
The much awaited follow-up to the bestselling A Fine Balance. A family saga of sorts, set in a Bombay apartment (really, it’s getting to be a genre of its own!), about an elderly, Parkinson’s...
The follow-up to Gao’s Nobel Prize-winning Soul Mountain. At the request of his naked, white German lover in the relative freedom of a Hong Kong hotel room in 1996, Gao’s fictionalized counterpart...
A sweeping saga of Tibet before the Chinese occupation, told through the privileged view of the self-proclaimed “renowned idiot son” of a Tibetan chieftain. Review: "New and Notable Fiction," AsianWeek<a href="http://bookdragonreviews.wordpress.com/files/2009/05/2002-07-18-book-supplement-fiction.pdf"...
Family Devotions Da Chen’s late father was supportive of every endeavor his son attempted. Except for becoming a writer. “Writers were always the first to be blamed and punished for any...