Tag: East Asia

A Handmaiden’s Tale

A hit at this year’s Cannes film festival and when it opened in Korea over the summer, The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi) is now in limited release. This stylish and twisty Korean thriller remains true to ...

The Met Goes to China

In July, while in New York, I toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s much buzzed about “China: Through the Looking Glass,” a visually stunning multimedia exhibit that showcases the varied ways that ...

Rebellious Anti-Rebels

Kyung-sook Shin’s I’ll Be Right There, originally published in South Korea in 2010, features illness, injury, rape, kidnappings, and at least four types of suicide, one of which is possibly murder ...

Edible Comics

Comics and food have a longstanding relationship, most spectacularly in a unique genre known in Japan, its country of origin, as ryôri manga, or cooking comics. These are comics entirely devoted to ...

Notes on a Reading

We asked novelist and Public Books contributor Ellis Avery to tell us about the Public Books event she recently hosted at Three Lives Books in Manhattan’s West Village with Ruth Ozeki, the author of ...

Periphery to Periphery

Paris, New York, and London: these are the world literary capitals that have historically attracted and nurtured aspiring artists, who in turn have mythologized such cities by lovingly evoking them ...

A Heike for the Ages

The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari), often referred to as Japan’s “epic,” is the subject of a lively new translation by Royall Tyler, the preeminent translator of Japanese classics. A work on ...

For Now and for Nao

Both of the protagonists in Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, set out to tell one story and wind up telling another. “Ruth”—like the book’s author a novelist living on an island in ...