Towards the end there are two similar chapters written from Iman’s point of view as she talks to a dying Bowie. They are two imaginings of the same moment that unfold very differently. These conversations are themselves ellipses, a blank page that we fill in with our own stories we pose as Bowie’s. No one saw those moments besides the two people inside them, and even they only saw one side. In Always Crashing in the Same Car, Olsen has created a poignant, stimulating meditation on definition by exploring the life of a man whose appeal is found in his ability to refuse conclusion.
A Land Imagined shows the allure of so-called development with mesmerizing shots of seemingly endless streams of sand cascading from gigantic machines into the sea, but also insists we look beneath the shiny surface to witness what Leow calls “the ruins that underpin Singapore’s glamourous prosperity” and the human cost of this perpetual growth. In a similar vein, Rachel Heng’s novel uses the dreams and aspirations of a kampong boy to track Singapore’s journey to “a bright, orderly, prosperous future,” whilst clearly delineating everything that the country thoughtlessly cast aside in the name of progress, revealing how paltry this progress turned out to be—and asks if it was all worth it
While Goo maintains an age-appropriate, lighthearted humor throughout the novel, “Throwback” takes powerful turns that highlight the author’s skill with emotional material, too. Especially poignant are scenes when Sam observes Priscilla’s painful experiences with racism, her own tension with her overworked, immigrant mother, and her premature shouldering of burdens like grief and work at the family dry cleaners.
The scatological and profane swim together in Cursed Bunny. Originally published in 2017, this is South Korean author Bora Chung’s first work to be translated into English. Chung takes aim at capitalism, misogyny and the social obsessions with youth and beauty through these stories, which fluidly cross genres from science fiction to traditional fable structures.
A little-known piece of history is resurfacing 100 years after the luxurious Peking Express train was attacked by bandits in the middle of the night and hundreds of passengers, including dozens of foreigners, were taken hostage and marched across the Chinese countryside.
James M. Zimmerman's “The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China” takes mountains of research and boils it down to a digestible telling of the 1923 train derailment that, despite having considerable political and personal consequences, had been largely forgotten. Aided by pictures and quotes — some directly from the bandits, hostages and other players involved in the so-called Lincheng Outrage — the lawyer takes on a surprisingly engaging voice as a historical author, cutting between people and scenes like a movie.