In his book China in Ten Words, author Yu Hua discusses in detail the multiple plights of the writers and artists of China. Censorship, legal battles, ownership; so many of a writer’s rights and freedoms can be put at risk, and they are on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter if these are the best …
Asian Literature
Award-winning Korean author Hye-young Pyun, a writer who excels at creating and controlling her tragic heroes like a puppet master does a marionette, is my favourite Korean author in translation. Her works The Hole and City of Ash and Red are masterpieces of genre fiction which both carved out new niches within the psychological horror …
With the Normal People TV series out now and Sally Rooney’s phenomenally grounded, honest, and cutting novel almost two years old, it’s time to look at the best books like Normal People for readers who have recently rediscovered the novel or viewers who have been entranced by the Normal People TV series. Normal People is …
Comma Press has, for several years now, been collecting short stories from authors based in cities around the world. Stories that speak to the cities they’re about. Stories that bring the city to life in surreal, explorative, and revelatory ways. The Book of Shanghai is easily my favourite in this series since The Book of …
So you want to start reading Haruki Murakami? You’ve seen his overwhelming popularity both in Japan and the West; you’ve heard the whispers, over and over, that he might finally win the Nobel Prize for Literature; you want to know what all the fuss is about. Murakami can be accessible and inaccessible in equal parts, …
We’re living through a turbulent and unknowable time where all aspects of life are shifting. What was once clear is now murky, and nothing is certain anymore. For many of us, the first thing to go was our enjoyment of simple pleasures like reading (myself included). Where did all that happy reading go? Many of …
That We May Live is bold, strange, and exciting. It takes risks, as most Chinese fiction does, and that risk pays off. Being a writer in China is risky business. Certain topics are off limits, writers like Ma Jian live in exile overseas, and journalists can write whatever they please about you, whether or not …
The world of Japanese manga, just like any big form of entertainment, can be a dizzying place to dive into. The same is true for anime and western comics: where to start. So, let’s talk about where to start reading manga. Browse a bookstore in the US and the UK and the sheer number of …
Spark has been such an enormous success in Japan – selling more than three million copies – that it has now been adapted into a Netflix series. But what is it? Spark is a short novel about comedy and the lives of the people who create it. Written by Naoki Matayoshi, a successful comedian in …
I write about dark tourism for a living and I read a lot of books about the atrocities that happen in our world. Although I had previously read a few of the non-fiction books of this list, in 2019, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and began reading everything I could find connected to …