by Roger Pulvers Eric is a black American soldier stationed in Japan at the height of the Vietnam War. Karen is a white American student who falls in love with him. Eric is about to be sent to the front line in Vietnam. But he refuses to kill … and the two go into hiding in Tokyo, pursued by both…
by Roger Pulvers Published originally in Australia by ABC Books and HarperCollins, and in Japanese translation by the major publishing house Shueisha, THE HONEY AND THE FIRES is a retelling of some of the most powerful stories from the Bible for our day and age. This new paperback edition contains a story that did not appear in the original publication: “The Story…
by Shih Chiung-Yu Haunted by memories of the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s, nationalist soldiers from all over mainland China are doomed to live out their days in exile in Taitung County, along the southeastern shore of the island of Taiwan. The three novellas in this collection tell stories of Chinese men who were forced to leave their…
Collection of Short Stories by Huang Chun-Ming Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt A Taiwanese businessman is forced to serve as a pimp for a group of seven Japanese men in his home village of Chiao-hsi. The formerly well-respected Ah-Le and his wife bear the weight of shame that his impotence has brought upon them. A young man drives…
by Yeng Pway Ngon In the 1910s, thirteen-year-old Leong Ping Hung comes to Singapore from China to seek his fortune. Decades later, he is a lonely old man mourning his shattered dreams. His granddaughter Yu Sau struggles to take care of him while trying to make sense of her own life in a rapidly changing country. He speaks Cantonese, and…
Author: Shih Chiung-Yu "Masked Dolls is one of those rare books which after reading reveals itself to be greater than the sum of its parts. Brutal, intense, fascinating." - The Writes of Woman "Set in turn-of-the-century Seoul and Taipei, Shih Chiung-yu’s novel depicts what it means to be a woman reconciling the scars of a tortured past with living in…
by Kenji Miyazawa Translated from the Japanese by Roger Pulvers. Night on the Milky Way Train occupies the place in the literature of Japan that Alice in Wonderland does in the English-speaking world. This amazing story of two boys – Kenji named them Giovanni and Campanella – who find themselves on a miraculous train running through the heavens, has entranced…
Short Stories by Xu Xiaobin With her delightfully evocative prose, Xu Xiaobin presents us with a collection of stories crawling with fraught power dynamics, strange events, and unsettling images. Not only does she write about women, but the worlds around them, the fears that dog them, and the histories that haunt them. Xu’s entangled plots sneak up on the reader…
by Roger Pulvers "LIV is a gripping mystery, of a present haunted by the past, but also a profoundly moral book, asking of the reader: what would you do? In this, LIV deserves comparison with novels as great as An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Reader by Bernhard Schlink." — David Peace, author of Tokyo Year Zero.…
2015 English Pen Translates Award; 2016 Financial Times / OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Awards (Longlisted). by Xu Xiaobin Yang Tianyi is a “leftover woman” and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen…
by Roger Pulvers This fascinating fictional account of the life and times of Lafcadio Hearn probes the question: "What was the nature of this man, born wanderer, informant of the fiendish details of Japanese lore ... a man who chose to live his life 'in defiance of the season'?" Still considered by the Japanese to be the foreigner with the…
by Li Tong Winner of the 1986 Hong Chien-Chuan Children's Literature Award and the 1989 Yang Huan Literature Award Through misunderstanding, sympathy, reconciliation and love, seven schoolchildren forged an abiding friendship in their hometown Penghu, a cluster of islands in the Taiwan Strait. Brought together by their Arts and Crafts teacher, the children learned to cherish their friendship and…
