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Talking to the enemy: stories
By Avner Mandelman. 2005
Nine stories about the Israeli experience. In "Terror" a father beats the son who fails to stand up for his…
five-year-old brother, thus instilling the precept that, right or wrong, family comes first, even before justice or fear. Strong language and some violence. Sophie Brody Medal. 2005Il était une fois en Arménie
By Antonia Arslan. 2006
"[...] En racontant l'histoire de son grand-oncle Sempad et de sa famille pendant le génocide arménien, Antonia Arslan écrit la…
chronique passionnante d'une des plus grandes tragédies du XXe siècle. Porté par une langue chatoyante qui rend hommage à la littérature populaire arménienne, un livre pudique, intense et émouvant. -- 4e de couvThe restaurant critic's wife
By Elizabeth LaBan. 2016
Lila's husband, Sam, takes his job as a restaurant critic too seriously. To protect his professional credibility, he's determined to…
remain anonymous and that preoccupation takes over their lives. Meanwhile, Lisa craves adult conversation and relief from her homemaker role. With her husband obsessed with anonymity, Lila begins to wonder if her own identity has disappeared. Adult. UnratedRosie colored glasses
By Brianna Wolfson. 2018
Whimsical, heartbreaking and uplifting, this is a novel about the many ways love can find you. Rosie Colored Glasses triumphs…
with the most endearing examples of how mothers and fathers and sons and daughters bend for one another. Just as opposites attract, they can also cause friction, and no one feels that friction more than Rex and Rosie's daughter, Willow. Rex is serious and unsentimental and tapes checklists of chores on Willow's bedroom door. Rosie is sparkling and enchanting and meets Willow in their treehouse in the middle of the night to feast on candy. After Rex and Rosie's divorce, Willow finds herself navigating their two different worlds. She is clearly under the spell of her exciting, fun-loving mother. But as Rosie's behavior becomes more turbulent, the darker underpinnings of her manic love are revealed. Rex had removed his Rosie colored glasses long ago, but will Willow do the same? UnratedLydia Cassat Reading the Morning Paper
By Harriet Scott Chessman. 2001
Harriet Scott Chessman takes us into the world of Mary Cassatt's early Impressionist paintings through Mary's sister Lydia, whom the…
author sees as Cassatt's most inspiring muse. Chessman hauntingly brings to life Paris in 1880, with its thriving art world. The novel's subtle power rises out of a sustained inquiry into art's relation to the ragged world of desire and mortality. Ill with Bright's disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world narrowing. With the rising emotional tension between the loving sisters, between one who sees and one who is seen, Lydia asks moving questions about love and art's capacity to remember. Chessman illuminates Cassatt's brilliant paintings and creates a compelling portrait of the brave and memorable model who inhabits them with such grace. Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper includes five full-color plates, the entire group of paintings Mary Cassatt made of her sister.Losing Kei
By Suzanne Kamata. 2007
A young mother fights impossible odds to be reunited with her child in this acutely insightful first novel about an…
intercultural marriage gone terribly wrong.Jill Parker is an American painter living in Japan. Far from the trendy gaijin neighborhoods of downtown Tokyo, she's settled in a remote seaside village where she makes ends meet as a bar hostess. Her world appears to open when she meets Yusuke, a savvy and sensitive art gallery owner who believes in her talent. But their love affair, and subsequent marriage, is doomed to a life of domestic hell, for Yusuke is the chonan, the eldest son, who assumes the role of rigid patriarch in his traditional family while Jill's duty is that of a servile Japanese wife. A daily battle of wills ensues as Jill resists instruction in the proper womanly arts. Even the long-anticipated birth of a son, Kei, fails to unite them. Divorce is the only way out, but in Japan a foreigner has no rights to custody, and Jill must choose between freedom and abandoning her child.Told with tenderness, humor, and an insider's knowledge of contemporary Japan, Losing Kei is the debut novel of an exceptional expatriate voice. Suzanne Kamata's work has appeared in over one hundred publications. She is the editor of The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan and a forthcoming anthology from Beacon Press on parenting children with disabilities. A five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, she has twice won the Nippon Airways/Wingspan Fiction Contest.Milky Way Railroad
By Ryu Okazaki, Joseph Sigrist, Kenji Miyazawa, D. M. Stroud. 2008
One night, alone on a hilltop, a young boy is swept aboard a magical train bound for the Milky Way.…
A classic in Japan, this tender fable is a book of great wisdom, offering insight into the afterlife.One of Japan's greatest storytellers, Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) was a teacher, author, poet, and scientist.Lydia Cassat Reading the Morning Paper: A Novel
By Harriet Scott Chessman. 2001
Harriet Scott Chessman takes us into the world of Mary Cassatt's early Impressionist paintings through Mary's sister Lydia, whom the…
author sees as Cassatt's most inspiring muse. Chessman hauntingly brings to life Paris in 1880, with its thriving art world. The novel's subtle power rises out of a sustained inquiry into art's relation to the ragged world of desire and mortality. Ill with Bright's disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world narrowing. With the rising emotional tension between the loving sisters, between one who sees and one who is seen, Lydia asks moving questions about love and art's capacity to remember. Chessman illuminates Cassatt's brilliant paintings and creates a compelling portrait of the brave and memorable model who inhabits them with such grace. Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper includes five full-color plates, the entire group of paintings Mary Cassatt made of her sister.Wintry Night (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
By Qiao Li. 2001
An epic spanning more than half a century of Taiwan's history, this breathtaking historical novel traces the fortunes of the…
Pengs, a family of Hakka Chinese settlers, across three generations from the 1890s, just before Taiwan was ceded to Japan as a result of the Sino-Japanese war, through World War II. Li Qiao brilliantly re-creates the dramatic world of these pioneers—and the colonization of Taiwan itself—exploring their relationships with the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan and their struggle to establish their own ethnic and political identities.This carefully researched work of fiction draws upon Li's own experiences and family history, as well as oral and written histories of the era. Originally published in Chinese as a trilogy, this newly translated edition is an abridgement for English-speaking readers and marks the work's first appearance in the English-speaking world. It was well-received in Taiwan as an honest—and influential—recreation of Taiwan's history before the relocation of the Republic of China from the mainland to Taiwan.Because Li's saga is so deeply imbued with the unique culture and complex history of Taiwan, an introduction explaining the cultural and historical background of the novel is included to help orient the reader to this amazingly rich cultural context. This informative introduction and the sweeping saga of the novel itself together provide an important view of Taiwan's little known colonial experience.A Girl's Story
By Annie Ernaux. 2020
Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize–shortlisted author of The Years. In A Girl&’s Story,…
Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another&’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man&’s, and then he moves on, leaving her without a &“master,&” bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.Beasts Head for Home: A Novel (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
By Kōbō Abe. 2017
In the aftermath of World War II, Kuki Kyūzō, a Japanese youth raised in the puppet state of Manchuria, struggles…
to return home to Japan. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Kyūzō finally makes his way to the waters off Japan but finds himself unable to disembark. His nation remains inaccessible to him, and now he questions its very existence. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries of human behavior from an exceptional modern Japanese author.Twilight in a Knotted World
By Mr Sidhhartha Sarma. 2020
The soil of central India hides more than the bones of long-dead giants. The East India Company is master of…
almost the entire subcontinent, but real power is now with the Crown. Far from the great games of the empire, Captain William Henry Sleeman is content to administer Jabalpur district and dig for remnants of petrified bones with his charming and knowledgeable wife. Until he is tasked with investigating the activities of an obscure group of criminals who are said to strangle their victims. As Sleeman uncovers the many layers of the Phansigar problem, he finds a language unlike any other, and a set of beliefs, lore and superstitions seemingly drawn from the soul of the countryside. He finds orchards of corpses, and a hierarchy of stranglers, but also ordinary men driven to murder. He hears subtle murmurs of discontentment at the changes which have come to a land believed by some to be unchanging. He finds auguries of a conflict to come. And behind it all, the legend of a mysterious, beautiful man, whose capture might be the key to understanding the Phansigars. Sleeman&’s inquiries will make him confront the nature of his beloved adopted homeland and of the mighty people in Calcutta who he serves. Through the prism of caste, the consequent web of intricate social and cultural relationships, and the nature of travel in the hinterland, he will see the real face of India and come across its uncomfortable, bleak truths. But to unravel such truths is not easy…The Taste of Apples (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
By Huang Huang Chun-ming. 2001
From the preeminent writer of Taiwanese nativist fiction and the leading translator of Chinese literature come these poignant accounts of…
everyday life in rural and small-town Taiwan. Huang is frequently cited as one of the most original and gifted storytellers in the Chinese language, and these selections reveal his genius. In "The Two Sign Painters," TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. "His Son's Big Doll" introduces the tortured soul inside a walking advertisement, and in "Xiaoqi's Cap" a dissatisfied pressure-cooker salesman is fascinated by a young schoolgirl.Huang's characters—generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty—come to life in all their human uniqueness, free from idealization.The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (Weatherhead Books on Asia)
By Bangqing Han. 2005
Desire, virtue, courtesans (also known as sing-song girls), and the denizens of Shanghai's pleasure quarters are just some of the…
elements that constitute Han Bangqing's extraordinary novel of late imperial China. Han's richly textured, panoramic view of late-nineteenth-century Shanghai follows a range of characters from beautiful sing-song girls to lower-class prostitutes and from men in positions of social authority to criminals and ambitious young men recently arrived from the country. Considered one of the greatest works of Chinese fiction, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai is now available for the first time in English. Neither sentimental nor sensationalistic in its portrayal of courtesans and their male patrons, Han's work inquires into the moral and psychological consequences of desire. Han, himself a frequent habitué of Shanghai brothels, reveals a world populated by lonely souls who seek consolation amid the pleasures and decadence of Shanghai's demimonde. He describes the romantic games played by sing-song girls to lure men, as well as the tragic consequences faced by those who unexpectedly fall in love with their customers. Han also tells the stories of male patrons who find themselves emotionally trapped between desire and their sense of propriety. First published in 1892, and made into a film by Hou Hsiao-hsien in 1998, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai is recognized as a pioneering work of Chinese fiction in its use of psychological realism and its infusion of modernist sensibilities into the traditional genre of courtesan fiction. The novel's stature has grown with the recent discovery of Eileen Chang's previously unknown translation, which was unearthed among her papers at the University of Southern California. Chang, who lived in Shanghai until 1956 when she moved to California and began to write in English, is one of the most acclaimed Chinese writers of the twentieth century.The Old Capital: A Novel of Taipei (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
By T'Ien-Hsin Chu. 2007
Chu T'ien-hsin's The Old Capital is a brilliant evocation of Taiwan's literature of nostalgia and remembrance. The novel is centered…
on the question, "Is it possible that none of your memories count?" and explores the reliability of remembrances and the thin line that separates fact from fantasy.Comprised of four thematically linked stories and a novella, The Old Capital focuses on the cultural and psychological realities of contemporary Taiwan. The stories are narrated by individuals who share an aching nostalgia for a time long past. Strolling through modern Taipei, they return to the lost, imperfect memories called forth by the smells and sensations of their city, and try to reconcile themselves to their rapidly changing world. The novella is built on the memories and recollections of a woman trying to make sense of herself and her homeland. After a trip to Kyoto to meet with a friend, she returns to Taipei, where, having been mistaken for a Japanese tourist, she revisits the sites of her youth using a Japanese colonial map of the city. Seeing Taipei anew, the narrator confronts the complex nature of her identity, embodied in the contrast between a serene and preserved Kyoto and a thoroughly modernized and chaotic Taipei. The growing angst of these narrators reflects a deeper anxiety over the legacy of Japan and America in Taiwan. The titles of the stories themselves-"Death in Venice," "Man of La Mancha," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "Hungarian Water"-reveal the strong currents of influence that run throughout the collection and shape the content and texture of the writing. In his meticulous translation, Howard Goldblatt captures the casual, intimate feel of Chu T'ien-hsin's writing while also maintaining its multiple layers of meaning. An intertextual masterpiece, The Old Capital is a moving and highly sensual meditation on the elasticity of memory and its power to shape personal identity.In his preface, the anonymous author of Courtesans and Opium describes his book as an act of penance for thirty…
years spent patronizing the brothels of Yangzhou. Written in the 1840s, his story is filled with vice and dark consequence, portraying the hazards of the city's seedy underbelly and warning others against the example of the Fool.Chinese literature's first true "city novel," Courtesans and Opium recounts the illustrious career of a debauched soul enveloped by enthralling pursuits and romantic illusions. While socially acceptable marriages were arranged and often loveless, brothels offered men accomplished courtesans who served as both enchanting companions and sensual lovers. These professional sirens dressed in the latest styles and dripped with gold, silver, and jewels. From an early age, they were taught to excel at various arts and graces, which transformed the brothel into a kind of club for men to meet, exchange gossip, and smoke opium at their leisure.The Fool's fable follows five sworn brothers and their respective relationships with Yangzhou courtesans, revealing in acute detail the lurid materialism of this dangerous world—its violence and corruption as well as its seductive but illusory promise. Never before translated into English, Courtesans and Opium offers a brilliant window into the decadence of nineteenth-century China.Daughter of the Tigris
By Muhsin Al-Ramli. 2019
The follow-up to the internationally acclaimed The President's Gardens"Al-Ramli is a remarkable storyteller, and in Daughter of the Tigris he…
creates a dynamic, intricately plotted narrative, brimming with stories and a host of memorable characters" Susannah Tarbush, Banipal On the sixth day of Ramadan, in a land without bananas, Qisma leaves for Baghdad with her husband-to-be to find the body of her father. But in the bloodiest year of a bloody war, how will she find one body among thousands? For Tariq, this is more than just a marriage of convenience: the beautiful, urbane Qisma must be his, body and soul. But can a sheikh steeped in genteel tradition share a tranquil bed with a modern Iraqi woman? The President has been deposed, and the garden of Iraq is full of presidents who will stop at nothing to take his place. Qisma is afraid - afraid for her son, afraid that it is only a matter of time before her father's murderers come for her. The only way to survive is to take a slice of Iraq for herself. But ambition is the most dangerous drug of all, and it could just seal Qisma's fate.Translated from the Arabic by Luke LeafgrenREVIEWS FOR THE PRESIDENT'S GARDENS'Though firmly rooted in its context, The President's Gardens' concerns are universal. It is a profoundly moving investigation of love, death and injustice, and an affirmation of the importance of dignity, friendship and meaning amid oppression. Its light touch and persistent humour make it an enormous pleasure to read' Robin Yassin-Kassab, Guardian.The President's Gardens evokes the fantastical, small town feel of One Hundred Years of Solitude Tom Gordon, Financial Times'No author is better placed than Muhsin Al-Ramli, already a star in the Arabic literary scene, to tell this story. I read it in one sitting' Hassan Blasim, winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction PrizeLove Like Hate: A Novel
By Linh Dinh. 2010
Linh Dinh is already one of the secret masters of short fiction. Love Like Hate is something like a traditional…
cross-cultural novel that's been shocked into life by Dinh's uncanny ability to tell us stories we didn't even know we wanted to hear. -- Ed Park, editor of The BelieverIn Love Like Hate, Linh Dinh weaves a dysfunctional family saga that doubles as a portrait of Vietnam in the last half century. Protagonists Kim Lan and Hoang Long marry in Saigon during the Vietnam War, uniting in a setting that allows Dinh's dark, deadpan humor to flourish. Describing his mushrooming cast of characters in unsentimental and sometimes absurd ways, Dinh embraces contradictions with the surreal exuberance of Matthew Sharpe and the stylistic élan of Italo Calvino.The Old Garden
By Hwang Sok-Yong, Jay Oh. 2000
Political prisoner Hyun Woo is freed after eighteen years to find no trace of the world he knew. The friends…
with whom he shared utopianist dreams are gone. His Seoul is unrecognizably transformed and aggressively modernized. Yoon Hee, the woman he loved, died three years ago. A broken man, he drifts toward a small house in Kalmoe, where he and Yoon Hee once stole a few fleeting months of happiness while fleeing the authorities. In the company of her diaries, he relives and reviews his life, trying to find meaning in the revolutionary struggle that consumed their youth--a youth of great energy and optimism, victim to implacable history.Hyun Woo weighs the worth of his own life, spent in prison, and that of the strong-willed artist Yoon Hee, whose involvement in rebel groups took her to Berlin and the fall of the wall. With great poignancy, Hwang Sok-yong grapples with the immortal questions--the endurance of love, the price of a commitment to causes--while depicting a generation that sacrificed youth, liberty, and often life, for the dream of a better tomorrow.Talking to the Enemy: Stories
By Avner Mandelman. 2005
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shaped the consciousness of a generation, but never before has it been brought to life in…
such vivid and telling prose. Part Tim O'Brien and part Bernard Malamud, Avner Mandelman's Talking to the Enemy ranges from boisterously entertaining tales of domestic squabbles to dark narratives from disillusioned soldiers. Awarded the Jewish Book Award when it was published in Canada and supplemented with recent stories, Talking to the Enemy is the powerful American debut of an international favorite."Pity" draws the reader through the descending layers of horror of an Israeli soldier who is party to an assassination attempt gone terribly wrong. In "Terror" a man recalls a traumatic childhood incident that taught him family comes first--before justice, before fear. On a lighter note, "Mish-Mash" is a comical tornado set off when a winning lottery ticket is discovered in a less-than-conventional family, best described as "Sholem Aleichem writes Peyton Place on speed" (Montreal Gazette). Underneath their often brash exteriors Mandelman's characters search for reconciliation and fulfillment in a land where conflict is a part of everyday life. Mandelman ensnares readers in intense plot-driven narratives that are pierced through with unexpected and ingenious twists. Beneath the surface of the often sparse prose lies evocative, unanswered questions about humanity. Every story delivers a thoroughly engrossing read with an unforgettable ending.