Once a platform for many a fine author – Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft, HG Wells … hell, even Charles Dickens – the short story has long fallen out of favour. Nineteenth century authors looking to establish themselves would submit their short stories or serialized novel to magazines and journals. [...]
Idiocy, Ltd.: A Genre-Bending Collection from Taiwan [Editor’s note: Eric Mader is an American expat writer working in Taiwan. His satirical novel A Taipei Mutt was published in 2002, and he has since published a collection of essays, Heretic Days. His most recent book, Idiocy, Ltd., is reviewed below by [...]
To get a closer, more insightful look at modern China than you do from reading Wish Lanterns, you would probably need to learn Mandarin, marry a Chinese woman, move to China, and live with your in-laws. Wish Lanterns follows the lives of six young Chinese born between 1985 and 1990. [...]
One bottle too many into a late-night session and sometimes my thoughts turn sour at living in such an adventureless age. The time when there were still blanks on the map – a mere two generations ago, almost within reach, damn it – is as distant as the days of [...]
The 1999 NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – a tragic accident to the White House, a deliberate and barbaric act of aggression according to the Chinese Communist Party – caused the deaths of three Chinese journalists, and sparked outrage in China. Tens of thousands of protestors demonstrated [...]
When it was first completed in 1578, the Bencao Gangmu (The Compendium of Materia Medica) was arguably the world’s greatest medical text. Drawing on hundreds of existing works and incorporating new scholarship, in almost two million characters it described the entire body of knowledge of Chinese medicine. Among the many [...]
With The Jade Lady, Taiwan resident Patrick Wayland brings us a spy thriller, which will give a novice a quick primer on the China-Taiwan relationship, written from a strongly pro-Taiwan perspective. And despite an unpromising title, referring to a valuable sculpture that is tangential to the main story, it’s not [...]
Endo’s Silence: the Grim Japanese Novel behind Martin Scorsese’s New Film Reviewed by Eric Mader The first Christian missionaries arrived in Japan in 1549. By 1583, an estimated 200,000 Japanese, from both the upper classes and the peasantry, had converted to the new faith, convincing the Catholic Jesuits who had [...]
This is the kind of book that makes you want to kidnap the world’s leading scientists and force them to build you a time machine. When I first came across Weirather’s account of American cowboy Fred Barton and his adventures in the Far East between 1911 and 1937, I was [...]
Heaven Lake is part coming-of-age tale, part travelogue – a thoughtful and thought-provoking story about faith, loneliness, and love. It takes its time with some old-fashioned pacing but rewards the patient reader. It is, I think, the best Taiwan expat novel. Regardless of how you define that category, it’s a [...]