Category: Asia

I Escaped A Chinese Internment Camp by Fahmida Azim, Anthony Del Col & Josh Adams

So I know that that order of attribution seems weird, as Fahmida Azim is the artist, Anthony Del Col the reporter and Josh Adams the art director of this Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novella. Like, who even puts the art director’s name on the cover of a book? But once you look at the contents, you’ll …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/02/13/i-escaped-a-chinese-internment-camp-by-fahmida-azim-anthony-del-col-josh-adams/

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

Black Water Sister by Zen Cho

In contrast to Doreen, I do not feel perfectly suited to review Black Water Sister. I’m basically none of the things that the protagonist is, starting with Malaysian and ending with haunted by my maternal grandmother’s ghost. (To be clear, Doreen is not haunted by her grandmother’s ghost either. As far as I know.) None …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/21/black-water-sister-by-zen-cho-2/

Der blaue Himmel by Galsan Tschinag

Der blaue Himmel by Galsan Tschinag

For some readers, Galsan Tschinag’s description of hard nomadic life in the Altai mountain region of Mongolia’s furthest western reaches in the 1950s will be enough. Der blaue Himmel — which could reasonably be translated as The Blue Sky or Blue Heaven — is a fictionalized memoir of a few years in a boy’s life, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/01/der-blaue-himmel-by-galsan-tschinag/

Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee

Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee

In Phoenix Extravagant, Yoon Ha Lee transposes the colonial history of Japanese rule in Korea to the Empire of Razan’s conquest of Hwaguk six years before the book’s beginning. Lee uses the framework to tell a story of an artist getting caught up in politics and history, only to discover they had been in it …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/03/19/phoenix-extravagant-by-yoon-ha-lee/

A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by Michael Axworthy

A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

I imagine that Michael Axworthy’s brief for this book ran something like this: Write a one-volume history of Iran, from as early as possible up through as close to the present as is practical. (The hardback edition was published in 2008; the edition that I have was published in 2010 and has an epilogue that …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/02/19/a-history-of-iran-empire-of-the-mind-by-michael-axworthy/

Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw

I always really, really want to like Cassandra Khaw’s work more than I do. Ngl, this desire is due in large part to the Malaysian connection, which is enforced in spades by the fact that the entire cast of this book is Malaysian as well! Our five friends — after a fashion — converge on …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/11/nothing-but-blackened-teeth-by-cassandra-khaw/

Before the West by Ayşe Zarakol

Before the West by Ayşe Zarakol

“How would the history of international relations in ‘the East’ be written,” asks Ayşe Zarakol, “if we did not always read the ending — the rise of the West and the decline of the East — into the past?” (frontispiece) Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders is her effort to …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/22/before-the-west-by-ayse-zarakol/

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Considering a book of scholarly articles about the history Chinese international relations, I wrote that it was “chock full of implied stories” and looked forward to the day that I could read some of them. Shelley Parker-Chan chose a later inflection point from Chinese history to tell the story of She Who Became the Sun, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/25/she-who-became-the-sun-by-shelley-parker-chan/

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

Forbidden love between two princesses. Forbidden not because they are both women, but because they are princesses, and relations between their two states are tense and unequal. Thanh is a princess of Bình Hải, in the south, nominally superior to its northern neighbor but falling back in relative power because of the neighbor’s greater access …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/06/11/fireheart-tiger-by-aliette-de-bodard/

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

It isn’t true that the full title for When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain was originally meant to be When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain With Her Two Tiger Sisters and Considered Eating Cleric Chih but it could have been. Except that at that point it would have been politic to mention the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/28/when-the-tiger-came-down-the-mountain-by-nghi-vo/