“If bears disappeared from this land,” writes Michio Hoshino in The Travelling Tree, “and we could sleep fearlessly in our camps at night, what a boring kind of nature it would be.” Mostly taking the author’s beloved Alaska as their topic, the short essays in this collection explore a human desire to reconnect with a natural world that appears, in its very essence, resistant to such a union. Hoshino nevertheless perseveres, and his enduring love of nature proves insightful reading for those chasing, in the author’s own words, “the other time that flows alongside the frantic daily exertions of humankind.”
To start: a confession. Academics often speak of imposter syndrome—the sense that we lack real expertise on the topics about which are talking or writing. Although it’s largely a psychological illusion, there are situations in which it’s not completely wrong to say that we are imposters. When we teach college courses we have to cover a lot of ground. There is therefore a wide variety in the depth of knowledge we bring to the range of subjects we cover. For some, we are genuinely experts and can talk at length with authority; for others we are operating on a much thinner basic level of expertise. It’s not to say that what we say in lectures or classes is necessarily wrong, but rather that we are well aware that there can be less real understanding than we would like of the nuances underlying a single slide and its 3 bullet points. Over time, we can hope to expand the range of our in-depth knowledge and fill in the areas about which we can talk with authority. For me, reading Gregory Smits’s and Takara Kurayoshi’s books on the Ryukyu islands has been such a process.
My Destiny is the third Liang Xiaosheng book brought into English translation, but the first novel. It follows the short story collection The Black Button published by Panda Books in 1992, and the memoir Confessions of a Red Guard from the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. The latter and My Destiny are both translations by Howard Goldblatt, easily the foremost among Chinese-to-English literary translators of his time. My Destiny will arrive in English publication from China Books six years after its publication in Chinese, and one year after a television adaptation.
Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim.
Part memoir, part meditation on the practice that Makato Fujimura has popularized as “slow art”, Art Is: A Journey into the Light is pithy yet expressive. In the acknowledgments, Makato Fujimura recalls his publisher’s exhortation to create a “beautiful book” emerging out of the malaise of the COVID-19 pandemic and this is indeed in many ways a beautifully produced and designed one. It will be of interest predominantly to followers of Fujimura’s ongoing efforts to harmonize artistic practice and Christian faith.
Intelligence failures are quite common in the history of warfare. During the First World War, according to a new book by Arabist and author Eamonn Gearon, British intelligence failures at Gallipoli and Kut al-Amara (in what later became Iraq) against troops of the Ottoman Empire spurred the creation of the Arab Bureau, which Gearon describes as an organization that “revolutionized the way in which intelligence operations were conducted in complex cultural environments, and pioneered methods that would influence approaches to intelligence work …for decades, … even up to the present day.”
Wu Ming-Yi is one of Taiwan’s most celebrated contemporary writers, whose work bridges literature, environmental thought, and history with a global perspective. The Wu Ming-Yi Companion, edited by Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu, is the first comprehensive volume in English dedicated to his oeuvre, offering new scholarship from leading researchers across Taiwan, Hong Kong, North America, and Europe. It also includes an essay by Wu himself and illustrations selected by Wu.
In In Search of Green China, Ma Tianjie traces how China has achieved impressive net progress towards its environmental goals, including cleaner air and water, and hard targets for peak greenhouse gas emissions, while at the same time closing the political space that once allowed citizens, NGOs, and journalists to shape that progress. The result, he suggests, is a greener China whose achievements are real, but whose silenced civil society leaves its environmental future more brittle and less just—even if some in Beijing would argue that fewer voices have made environmental policy more coherent.
Jiban Narah’s The Yellow Metaphor is an unassuming collection of poetry, written from 1990 to 2023, that draws from the Mising and Assamese traditions of north-east India. Occasionally embedded in the English translation are the original Mising words, a translator’s decision to retain the otherworldliness of the poems. Assamese geography, fauna, and history feature prominently throughout the book. While steeped in regional references, Narah blends his poetry with literary allusions to Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, as well as spiritual representations of Krishna.
There is a moment in Mohammed Hanif’s new novel where Baghi, founder of a cut-rate English tuition centre in Rawalpindi watches a Himalayan quack hawk libido supplements to a crowd of labourers on the morning after erstwhile PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. Grief hangs in the air like smoke. The country is in shock. And yet here they all are, jostling for aphrodisiacs. Baghi wonders about a nation “where even on a day like this, when death hangs in the air, people are still interested in finding aids for their libido.” That sentence is the novel’s thesis statement, epigraph, and punchline rolled into one.
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