Tag: Southeast Asia

The Afterlife of Agent Orange

“All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Even decades after the first war ends, the second war can ...

How To Catch a Philippine Serial Killer

F. H. Batacan’s Smaller and Smaller Circles, a gripping crime thriller, winner of the prestigious Philippine National Book Award and until now available only in the Philippines, begins with the ...

O My Swineherd!

The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s ...

The Stranger’s Voice

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a ...

Kim Thúy: A Way with Words

Over the past five years, Kim Thúy has become one of the best known and most celebrated francophone writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Born in 1968, Thúy fled Vietnam by boat at the age of 10. After ...

Caught in the Game

The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed ...

Megalopolis Now

It is no surprise that New York City, immodestly known as “the capital of the world,” figures so strongly in the popular imagination of apocalypse: think of the submerged Statue of Liberty in the ...

Up from the Shadows

“Aren’t archives supposed to be forever? Well, forever’s a meaningless concept in Asia. Here, only the present is eternal.” So we read early on in Sandi Tan’s debut novel, The Black Isle, a ...

Revolution Amnesia

Philippine National Book Award–recipient Gina Apostol is a novelist with a penchant for unlikely heroes. Gun Dealers’ Daughter, her American debut, is no exception. The bulk of the novel offers the ...