Returning from summer....

The sharp-eyed / sharp-memoried / keen amongst you may have noticed the blog is reopening after the summer break a day later than I said it would - that's because I was flying yesterday. So I missed the 50th edition of UNESCO's International Literacy Day. Apologies. Over the coming week, I hope to have a couple of posts on promoting literacy in Asia.

Closing for August / happy reading

The blog is now closed for August. It will reopen on World Literacy Day, Thursday September 8th. 

To those in the northern hemisphere: happy summer reading! 

To those in the southern hemisphere: happy August reading! 

Lion City Lit: Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

Asian Books Blog is based in Singapore. Lion City Lit explores in-depth what’s going on in the City-State, lit-wise. Here Lucía Damacela continues her occasional series of conversations with founders and editors of Singapore-based online literary magazines. Today, the focus is on the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, (QLRS), the longest- running online literary magazine in the country.

500 words from Quincy Carroll

500 words from...is a series of guest posts from authors writing about Asia, or published by Asia-based, or Asia-focused, publishing houses, in which they talk about their latest books. Quincy Carroll is a writer from Massachusetts. After graduating from college in 2007, he moved to Hunan, China, for three years. He currently works at a school in Oakland, California. He published his debut novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside through Inkshares, a crowd-funding platform.  Here he talks about how crowd-funding got his novel off the ground.

500 words from Jeffrey Wasserstrom

500 words from...is a series of guest posts from authors writing about Asia, or published by Asia-based, or Asia-focused, publishing houses, in which they talk about their latest books. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is an American historian of modern China who teaches at the University of California, Irvine. He edited a fantastic new reference book, the Oxford Illustrated History of Modern China. Here he talks about selecting the illustrations.

Classics corner: A Pail of Oysters, by Vern Sneider

Asian Books Blog generally covers new books, but in this new series, classics corner, guest writers will introduce older titles you may like to read. Jonathan Benda kicks off the series by discussing A Pail of Oysters, by Vern Sneider

A day in the life of Michael Cannings

A day in the life of…is an occasional series in which people working in the publishing industry talk about their typical working day. Here, Michael Cannings, one of the founders of Camphor Press, a British-Taiwanese publishing house specialising in books about East Asia, in particular Taiwan, explains there is in fact no typical working day in his life…