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.