Indie Spotlight: G.L. Tysk

Indie Spotlight is our monthly column on self-publishing. This month, Raelee Chapman talks to indie author G.L Tysk.

G.L Tysk was born in Chicago to Hong Kong Immigrants and her novels focus on early American whaling history and its impact, 19^th century colonialism, and Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant culture. Her first novel The Sea-God at Sunrise is based on the story of John Manjiro one of the first Japanese people to live and work in America. It took four years to research and reached the quarter finals of the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. It has also been well received on Goodreads with above 4 out of 5 stars as an average rating.  G.L Tysk’s new novel Paradise, the sequel to Sea-God at Sunrise, was released in February 2015.

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

Poetry: excerpts from Hula Hooping byTammy Ho Lai-Ming
Partitioning the Chinese empire byRobert Nield
In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China by Michael Meyer reviewed by Joshua Bird

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The Sunday Post

A rojak* of items that caught my eye this week…

Q & A: English PEN

English PEN is the founding centre of a worldwide writers’ association with 145 centres in more than 100 countries. The organisation campaigns to defend writers and readers around the world whose right to freedom of expression is at risk.

PEN works to remove inequalities which prevent people’s enjoyment of, and learning from, literature. It matches writers with marginalised groups, such as refugees, and women and young people who have been victims of trafficking.

PEN promotes translation into English of published work in foreign languages which is considered to be of outstanding literary merit. Many of these works are to be found on World Bookshelf, its collection of contemporary literature in translation. Meanwhile, PEN Atlas features literary dispatches from around the world.

Erica Jarnes, Writers in Translation Programme Manager, and Cat Lucas, who runs the Writers at Risk Programme, collaborated on answering questions.

Asian Authors/Books From Asia Meetup

  At the Diana Green History lecture by Elif Shafak,  

Following on from last week’s post about Asia Bookroom, the bookshop in Australia devoted to books with Asian interest, here’s a guest post from Mariam Mathew, organizer of a book club in London devoted to discussing books by Asian authors, and books about Asia.

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

The Bear Whispers to Me by Chang Ying-Tai, translated by Darryl Sterk reviewed by Peter Gordon
Outside reading: links to essays and articles on writing, literature, translation selected by Peter Gordon
Massage by Bi Feiyu reviewed byTimothy Sifert
Opium and Empire: The Lives and Careers of William Jardine and James Matheson by Richard J. Grace reviewed by Jonathan Chatwin

The Sunday Post: Bibliotherapy

In Asia, we’re used to supplementing antibiotics with a whole range of other therapies: Ayurveda, TCM, Malay Traditional Medicine, and so on and so forth. Now readers can try bibliotherapy: the prescribing of fiction for life’s ailments, physical, or emotional.  Or so bibliotherapists Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin suggest. They have collaborated on The Novel Cure, a pharmacopoeia – with a difference.

Teaching translation at the Chengdu Bookworm Festival / Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman is a much-acclaimed translator of Chinese into English. She focusses on fiction, poetry and occasionally literary non-fiction, by authors such as Chen Xiwo, Han Dong, Hong Ying, Xinran, Yan Geling and Zhang Ling. Her translation of Dorothy Tse's Snow and Shadow is on the longlist for the Best Translated Book Award 2015.

Nicky here writes about teaching translation, in China. 

A Day In The Life Of Asia Bookroom

A Day In The Life Of…is an occasional series in which booksellers and people working in the publishing industry talk about their working day.  Here, Lynette Thomas, of Asia Bookroom, talks about a day in the shop.

For over 30 years, Asia Bookroom, in Macquarie, Australia, has specialised in new, out of print and antiquarian books of Asian interest.

So: over to Lynette…

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews:

Jim's Terrible City: JG Ballard and Shanghai by James H Bollen reviewed by John D. Van Fleet
Poetry: The Game of 100 Ghosts by Terry Watada reviewed by Todd Shimoda
The Greening of Asia: The Business Case for Solving Asia's Environmental Emergency by Mark L. Clifford reviewed by Doug Ogden
Fortune’s Ten must-read books that explain modern China reviewed by Peter Gordon.

Gunter Grass Obituaries

Gunter Grass died yesterday.  Here are six of the many obituaries being published around the world.

The Guardian (UK)
The New York Times (USA)
Spiegel Online International (Germany, in English)
The Japan Times (Japan, in English)
Aljazeera (Qatar, in English)
The Hindu (India, in English)

Bailey's Women's Fiction Prize 2015 shortlist

Bad luck to PP Wong (The Life of a Banana) and to Xiaolu Gu (I Am China) who were both on the longlist for The Bailey's Women's Fiction Prize (formerly The Orange Prize), but who failed to make the shortlist, announced yesterday.

But great news that Kamila Shamsie (A God in Every Stone) and Laline Paull (The Bees) both made the cut.

The shortlist

Author	Title	Publisher	Nationality	Notes
Rachel Cusk	Outline	Faber/Vintage	British	8thNovel
Laline Paull	The Bees	Fourth Estate	British	1stNovel
Kamila Shamsie	A God in Every Stone	Bloomsbury	Pakistani/British	6thNovel
Ali Smith	How to be Both	Hamish Hamilton	British	6thNovel
Anne Tyler	A Spool of Blue Thread	Chatto & Windus	American	20thNovel
Sarah Waters	The Paying Guests	Virago	British	6thNovel

Q & A: Julianne Schultz / New Asia Now

Griffith Review is Australia’s leading literary quarterly. Each issue is themed. Recent editions have covered topics as varied as renewal after natural disaster (Surviving, edition 35), globalisation (Small World, edition 37), and migration within the Pacific, (Pacific Highways, edition 43).  Each themed collection features a mix of essays, memoir, reportage, short fiction, poetry and visual essays by emerging and established authors who tease out the complexities of the subjects and events under discussion.

Big Brother Mouse / Ann Bennett

Ann Bennett’s novel Bamboo Heart won the inaugural Asian Books Blog Book of The Lunar Year Award, for the Year of the Horse – click here for details.  Ann’s (ahem) prize was to write a guest blog about a charity dedicated to promoting literacy in Asia... 

My chosen charity is one you probably won’t have heard of. It is called Big Brother Mouse and is based in Luang Prabang in Laos. Before I stumbled across it I did a fair amount of internet surfing, and made enquiries of several friends with knowledge of the region. I discovered that there are many projects working on improving literacy in Asia, including UNESCO, and other well-known names such as Save the Children.

Best Translated Book Award 2015: two Chinese titles on the longlist

Congratulations to Dorothy Tse and translator Nicky Harman (Snow and Shadow),and to Can Xue and translator Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (The Last Lover), who have made it to the longlist for the Best Translated Book Award 2015. Click here for more information.

Keep an eye-out for a guest post from Nicky Harman, coming next week. 

This Week in Asian Review of Books

Asian Books Blog is not a review site. If you want reviews, see the Asian Review of Books. Here is a list of its newest reviews and round ups:

Poetry: Hula Hooping by Tammy Ho Lai-ming reviewed by Mani Rao
Outside reading: essays and articles on Russia and Asia, Middle Eastern and Indian literature, diversity selected by Peter Gordon
The Defections by Hannah Michell; The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith reviewed by John W. W. Zeiser
Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish reviewed by Jill Baker
Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary by Anita Anand Review round up

The Hindu Prize / Submissions

The Hindu Prize shines a light on the best Indian fiction in English every year. It is run by The Hindu newspaper, which now invites submissions from publishers for the 2015 prize. Self-published titles are not eligible. See here for details.