500 words from Joyce Bergvelt

500 words from is an occasional series in which novelists talk about their new novels. Joyce Bergvelt is about to publish her debut novel Lord of Formosa.

Joyce is Dutch, but she spent a formative year in Taiwan, and she is fluent in Mandarin. She now works as a journalist.

Lord of Formosa takes us back to 1624. In southwestern Taiwan the Dutch establish a trading settlement; in Nagasaki a boy is born who will become immortalised as Ming dynasty loyalist Koxinga. Lord of Formosa tells the intertwined stories of Koxinga and the Dutch colony from their beginnings to their fateful climax in 1662. The year before, as Ming China collapsed in the face of the Manchu conquest, Koxinga retreated across the Taiwan Strait intent on expelling the Dutch. Thus began a nine-month battle for Fort Zeelandia, the single most compelling episode in the history of Taiwan. The first major military clash between China and Europe, it is a tale of determination, courage, and betrayal – a battle of wills between the stubborn Governor Coyett and the brilliant but volatile Koxinga.

So, over to Joyce…

The White Book shortlisted for Man Booker International Prize

The Man Booker International Prize celebrates works of fiction from around the world, that have English translations published in the UK. The shortlist of six books in contention for the 2018 prize has just been announced. The GBP50,000 prize for the winning book will be divided equally between its author and translator.

The list includes Han Kang, and Deborah Smith, who together won the prize in 2016 for The Vegetarian. 

Asian Contemporary Voices: Interview with Kirstin Chen, author of Bury What We Cannot Take

Courtesy of Susan Deragon

Kirstin Chen's new novel, Bury What We Cannot Take (Little A, March 2018), has been named a Most Anticipated Upcoming Book by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle, among others. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She was the fall 2017 NTU-NAC National Writer in Residence in Singapore, and has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Born and raised in Singapore, she currently resides in San Francisco. Visit her at kirstinchen.com

Student bookshelf: exploring Mongolian folktales

Aurelia Paul is a senior year student at Boston University, studying comparative literature and Chinese. In her fortnightly column Student bookshelf, she shares responses to texts she's reading in her classes.

Here she discusses Mongolian Folktales edited by Hilary Roe Metternich.

Interview with Singapore Unbound Founder Jee Leong Koh

This is Lucía Orellana Damacela first column as International Correspondent for Asian Books Blog. Interview with New York-based Singapore Unbound founder and organizer Jee Leong Koh.

 
How was SG Unbound born, when, who created it?

It all began when writer and arts administrator Paul Rozario-Falcone and I got together one wintry afternoon in Cornelia Street Café, in New York City, to discuss the possibility of organizing a Singapore literature showcase in our adopted home. The literary scene in Singapore was growing, with new writers, presses, and publications, and we thought it was time to introduce the Big Apple to the Little Red Dot.

To rally support from the creative community in NYC, we started the Second Saturdays Reading Series, a monthly gathering featuring an open mike and a published author, and hosted in different private homes around the city. The first Second Saturdays gathering was held in Paul and Al’s home in Carroll Gardens in February 2014.

With the support of this community, we mounted the first Singapore Literature Festival in NYC in October that year, showcasing 14 Singaporean writers. The festival was so warmly received that I

was encouraged to make it a biennial event. At the 2^nd Festival in September 2016, Singapore Unbound was officially launched.

New life stories, one at a time by Choo Waihong

At Chinese New Year, The Kingdom of Women:  Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains by Choo Waihong won the Asian Books Blog Book of the Lunar Year in the Year of the Rooster.

The “prize” for the winning author of the Book of the Lunar Year is to write a guest post about a secular charity of his or her choice, promoting literacy or education in Asia.

Waihong chose to write about New Life Stories, a Singapore-based non-profit supporting pre-school education for the children of incarcerated mothers. New Life Stories helps provide vulnerable children with essential educational and social skills, to ensure they aren't left behind in the crucial early years of their development. It also supports the children's incarcerated mothers, both while they are in prison, and during reintegration into society.

Together, mother and child are able to rewrite the stories of their lives and to chart a more positive future.

So, over to Waihong, to talk more about New Life Stories...

The evolution of City of Devils / guest post by Paul French

Paul French is a widely-published journalist and commentator on China. Previous books include a history of foreign correspondents in China and a biography of the legendary Shanghai adman, journalist and adventurer Carl Crow.

City of Devils is French’s much-anticipated second narrative non-fiction book, following Midnight in Peking which was a New York Times bestseller, and a BBC Radio 4 book of the week.

City of Devils is set in Shanghai, 1941, where even the wildest dreams seem possible. It is a true story of two friends turned enemies. In a city under siege Viennese Joe Farren rose to fame by cashing in on Shanghai’s desperate pleasure seeking. King of the chorus lines, his name was splashed in neon across the infamous Badlands nightclub ‘Farren’s’. American fugitive Jack Riley, his fingertips acid-burnt, found a future in Shanghai as ‘The Slots King’. ‘Dapper Joe’ and ‘Lucky Jack’ collided, clashed and came together again in a frantic struggle to survive the city’s last days. Paul French resurrects the denizens of old Shanghai’s ganglands, the drug-running, the gambling, and the graft, vividly restoring this long-overlooked side of the city’s history.

Here Paul explains how he came to focus on ‘Dapper Joe’ and ‘Lucky Jack’, in a book initially intended as a portrait of Shanghai.