Hello fellow bookworms, It has been a long time since I last posted. As usual, it’s that old enemy to blame – a lack of time. I've been extremely busy with my day job, work on books for the new publishing venture Plum Rain Press, a Taiwan history podcast called [...]
On June 1, 2024, my literary friend Bradley Winterton passed away at the age of 86 at his home in Saigon. Before his passing, I had been working on his book Moments of Vision: Views and Reviews from East Asia. In fact, just three days before his death, he wrote [...]
In my review of Simon Rowe’s Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere (2020), I wrote of the titular “Pearl City” chapter: “It’s a very satisfying story but one that leaves you wanting a full novel. We want to ride with Ms. Suzuki again.” And that’s exactly what we get [...]
John Ross chats with Scott F. Crawford, an American writer based in East Asia. They talk about Scott’s Silk Road Centurion, published by Camphor Press in 2023, a historical adventure set in the Chinese borderlands two millennia ago. * * * Scott, we first met, online at least, five years [...]
The book is surely man’s greatest invention. Sometimes, though, there’s a faulty leap in logic equating the civilizational glory of printed text with the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press circa 1440. That’s a Eurocentric and modernity-skewed way of looking at things. Over the last two millennia, it is [...]
Bridging East & West is a fast-paced and fun account of Kathie Wei-Sender’s long, fascinating life, from childhood dangers during the Sino-Japanese War to an arranged marriage and move to the United States, to a career in nursing and then a reinvention as bridge champion mixing with world political leaders. [...]
Jen Paolini speaks with author John Saeki and reviews his The Last Tigers of Hong Kong. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Hong Kong stood as the backdrop to a spate of urban developments, transforming from “a barren rock” to a desirable port city in a matter of decades. [...]
SPOILER ALERT: Plot details of the novel Lily Narcissus are discussed in this interview. Jonathan Lerner lived in Taipei for two years in the late 1950s when his father, a foreign service officer, was stationed there. Later he was involved with the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, and then [...]
This engrossing novel of expat life in Taipei in the late 1950s is a story which stays with you. That’s due, in part, to the interesting, believable characters, but also because the ending leaves a few threads untied. The minor mystery of the “Narcissus” in the title is easily enough [...]
Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges – long-time China watchers and prolific authors – seek to lay out the facts about Xi Jinping without prejudice and bombast. And they succeed. Some might say the subtitle itself, “The Most Powerful Man in the World,” is bombastic. It’s not. It happens to be [...]