What’s new
“The Fifth Crusade” by Thomas Smith
This century’s “forever wars” have nothing on the Crusades, which lasted some three centuries and had to be numbered. Lay interest in the Crusades seems to diminish after the clash of heavy hitters Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third and the disrepute engendered by the Fourth, in which the Franks turned on their…
“Yakuza” by Andrew Rankin
The word yakuza has its own history, and it is not what most readers assume. Kabuki theater and popular fiction…
“Up the River of Time” by Cheng-hua Wang
Can a painting outlive its authenticity? For art lovers and collectors, an artwork’s value is often inseparable from its status…
“Traversing the Belt and Road: The World According to China and China According to the World”
As are many things regarding China’s developing place in the world, the “Belt and Road Initiative” (or BRI)—the term used…
“Everyday Tang: On What We Can Learn From a Dynasty” by Xiaolu Guo
A near-desperate Chinese migrant mother, long estranged from her own cultural inheritance, takes her British daughter to China before adolescence…
“Rival Civilizations: The Rise of Japan and Visions of World Order in Britain” by Chika Tonooka
The rise of Japan as a world power in the early 20th century produced in Great Britain a rethinking of geopolitics and world order. It marked a shift from Eurocentrism to a more global approach to thinking about world politics. Japan’s stunning victory over Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, Cambridge professor Chika Tonooka…
“Red Seal” by Rosa Kwon Easton
Rosa Kwon Easton’s debut novel, White Mulberry, tells the story of Miyoung, a Korean nurse who passes as Japanese while living and working in Japan as World War II erupts. In that book, Miyoung learns to do whatever she can to protect herself from danger. In the newly-published sequel Red Seal, which takes place across…
“Paving the Sea” by Rashid El-Daif
Lebanese novelist and poet Rashid El-Daif is one of the leading voices in contemporary Arabic literature, perhaps best known in…
“Absolute Jafar” by Sarnath Banerjee
A border is usually imagined as a line on a map. In Absolute Jafar, Sarnath Banerjee shows how that line…
“Bombay Tabloid” by Kersi Khambatta
At the center of Kersi Khambatta’s Bombay Tabloid is Cyrus Kerman, the son of an Iran-born bakery owner, and his…
“Taiwan Travelogue” by Yang Shuang-zi
The winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize (and the 2024 US National Book Award for Translated Literature) is a…
“The Final Six” by Akinari Asakura
A prestigious IT company sets six job finalists, all fresh out of university, an unusual task: through a group discussion, they have to decide who among them will get the job. If they manage to do so, the company will extend an offer to the winner. If they fail, everyone goes home empty-handed. The conversation…
“The Imitation Englishman” by Devki Pande
It is 1916, the middle of World War I. Madhusudan Chandra Joshi is a young clerk who works at the District Courts of India. As he journeys to Heidelberg to…
“Snakes of Singapore: A Slightly Unhinged Field Guide” by Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray
Meet Singapore’s strangest inhabitants. The snake that cartwheels. The snake that clones itself. The snake that flies through the air. Snakes are everywhere in Singapore, gliding through mangroves, sunning on…
“My Wild City: Finding Nature, Meaning, and Hope in India’s Capital” by Neha Sinha
In My Wild City, acclaimed nature writer Neha Sinha takes us on an unforgettable journey through the hidden wildernesses of the bustling metropolis of Delhi, India, where she finds as…
“Chinese Media Improvisations” by Xuenan Cao
Xuenan Cao offers an unexpected angle on China’s technological rise, spotlighting the role of deficit-driven improvisation. As Cao demonstrates, where printing paper, computers, and microchips have been in shortage, media…
You must be logged in to post a comment.