During a Publisher Interview last year with Graham Earnshaw, the man behind Earnshaw Books, I asked which era he thought was most underrepresented in English-language books on China. The 1950s he said without a moment’s hesitation, and I have to agree. Since that conversation, he’s been doing his bit to […]
Talented American writer and photographer Tom Carter is one of the great characters of the expat tribe in China. I’ve always admired the way he throws himself into projects with the kind of tireless passion that makes the Energiser Bunny look lazy. When Carter did a photographic book on the […]
Alvin Lu, a second-generation Taiwanese American who was born and currently lives in San Francisco, is the author of The Hell Screens, a stylish thriller set in Taipei. The protagonist is Chinese-American Cheng-Ming, who is obsessed with a serial rapist-murderer known as the Taxi Driver Killer (aka K), who is terrorizing the […]
You feel a certain amount of pressure to be emotionally moved when visiting Nagasaki’s most important atomic bomb sites such as the Peace Park, the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, and the Atomic Bomb Hypocentre Park (the spot above which the “Fat Man” bomb detonated at 11:02 on August 9, 1945). If […]
The Pearl of the Orient, the Paris of the East – Shanghai of the 1920s to 1949 has long captivated readers as one of history’s great cities; it’s been a first-choice setting for China fiction and non-fiction. Is there room on the shelf for yet another title? Yes, if the […]
Hong Kong is under siege. From property developers razing neighborhoods to build yet more skyscrapers. From the push-and-pull emanating from Beijing to demand greater subservience from this former British colony.
Even without all that pressure, Hong Kong could very well collapse under the weight of its own population, permanent and transient, […]
Finding the Way is an audacious novel. It takes some courage to pen a fictional life of such a revered figure as Laozi. He is, after all, a much loved philosopher considered to be the founder of Taoism, and sometimes even worshipped as a deity (my wife’s family actually has a temple […]
In 1970, United States park ranger Alexander Weiss found writing on the walls. He was in the abandoned wooden barracks on Angel Island, a bit of rock in San Francisco Bay. Inside those barracks, Weiss found thousands of characters carved into the walls. Those characters were eventually determined to be […]
Daniel Reid is a prolific writer on Chinese philosophy, medicine, and food. He lived in Taipei from 1973 to 1989, and by number of book titles – more than thirty – and copies sold, he is surely the most successful Taiwan expat writer of all time. His latest book, a […]
Han Kang is a writer whose books are in conversation with each other. Themes and images migrate from one book to another. A line of dialogue that appears in one novel forms the basis of the next. Her books build on each other the way a nautilus creates its shell. […]