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The Baseball Widow • Suzanne Kamata
Taiwan’s greatest sports story occurred during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). The Kano baseball team, a ragtag band of players from a two-bit school in a backwater city, defied the odds to...
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Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World • Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges
Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges – long-time China watchers and prolific authors – seek to lay out the facts about Xi Jinping without prejudice and bombast. And they succeed. Some might say the subtitle...
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Lily Narcissus • Jonathan Lerner
This engrossing novel of expat life in Taipei in the late 1950s is a story which stays with you. That’s due, in part, to the interesting, believable characters, but also because the ending leaves a few...
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Author Interview: Jonathan Lerner
SPOILER ALERT: Plot details of the novel Lily Narcissus are discussed in this interview. Jonathan Lerner lived in Taipei for two years in the late 1950s when his father, a foreign service officer, was...
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The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats that Stalked Britain’s...
Jen Paolini speaks with author John Saeki and reviews his The Last Tigers of Hong Kong. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Hong Kong stood as the backdrop to a spate of urban developments,...
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Bridging East & West • Kathie Wei-Sender
Bridging East & West is a fast-paced and fun account of Kathie Wei-Sender’s long, fascinating life, from childhood dangers during the Sino-Japanese War to an arranged marriage and move to the...
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Paper Horses: Woodblock Prints of Gods from Northern China • David Leffman
The book is surely man’s greatest invention. Sometimes, though, there’s a faulty leap in logic equating the civilizational glory of printed text with the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type...
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Author Interview: Scott Crawford
John Ross chats with Scott F. Crawford, an American writer based in East Asia. They talk about Scott’s Silk Road Centurion, published by Camphor Press in 2023, a historical adventure set in the Chinese...
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Mami Suzuki: Private Eye • Simon Rowe
In my review of Simon Rowe’s Pearl City: Stories from Japan and Elsewhere (2020), I wrote of the titular “Pearl City” chapter: “It’s a very satisfying story but one that leaves you wanting a full...
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Moments of Vision • Bradley Winterton
On June 1, 2024, my literary friend Bradley Winterton passed away at the age of 86 at his home in Saigon. Before his passing, I had been working on his book Moments of Vision: Views and Reviews from...
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