As someone who enjoys historical fiction, I had the opportunity to watch Saimdang and read Belle Ami’s The Girl Who Knew Da Vinci within the last year. At first glance, the two works seemed unrelated. Saimdang is a...
Fiction
Guest Writer
Book Review: ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ by Ruth Ozeki
On a gloomy Michigan afternoon, I curmudgeonly ventured to the Ann Arbor Public Library to check out a book for a literature class. To make my dreaded feat towards the over-400- page reading assignment worse, the...
Book Review: ‘Everything I Never Told You’ by Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng’s seminal 2014 book Everything I Never Told You, perfectly captures the fallout of a nuclear family following an unexpected and horrifying tragedy. The author’s breakout first novel topped the Amazon...
Book Review: ‘The Nakano Thrift Shop’ by Hiromi Kawakami
“When you get old and far-sighted, you can’t look your sweetheart in the eye from close up. You need a little distance, so that you can focus on each other. So that your faces don’t look blurry– anyway, you need a...
Marisa Jue
Book Review: ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ by Kevin Kwan
“You never told me you lived in a palace.” “This isn’t a palace. It’s just a big house.” “Nick, where I come from, this is a palace,” Rachel said. Rachel Chu is doing pretty well for herself. She’s a Stanford-educated...
Book Review: ‘The Impossible Fairy Tale’ by Yujoo Han
“After waking from my dream, I came back to reality. But my reality remains fictional… The most beautiful snow crystal in the world and the most beautiful word in the world still don’t exist. They don’t command any...
Laksmi Pamuntjak: literary force of Indonesia talks of female ambiguity and “Asian literature” in the West
[agg-ad id=”14519″ align=”left”] When Laksmi Pamuntjak published her first volume of poems, Ellipsis, Herald UK selected it as one of the best books of 2005. She has written for Indonesian weekly...
Yeseul Park
Book Review: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
“On the boat, we often wondered: Would we like them? Would we love them? Would we recognize them from their pictures when we first saw them on the dock?” It is hard to deny the importance of history. Knowledge of...
Book review: ‘Sarong Party Girls’ by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
“We don’t have any more time to waste! We are not young anymore, you know – Fann just turned twenty-seven, my twenty-seventh birthday is two months away and Imo’s is not far behind. If we don’t get married, engaged or...
Book Review: ‘One Hundred Shadows’ by Hwang Jungeun
“I saw a shadow in the woods. I didn’t know it was a shadow at first. I saw it slip through a thicket and followed it in, wondering if there was a path there, and thinking how familiar it looked. The woods grew more...