An earful
Peera Songkünnatham
How a poem about Yingluck Shinawatra’s ear shines a light on the patriarchal culture embedded in Thai folk tales.
Category: Reviews
Lost in translation
Liam Kelley
Ben Kiernan’s history of Vietnam gets lost in translation
Singing is listening
Michael Freeman
New poetry from Asia’s remote borderlands
Pulp horror
Tiffany Tsao
How Western reviewers missed the point of Eka Kurniawan’s latest work.
Fall for Saigon
Connla Stokes
Can Ho Chi Minh City survive the drive to transform it into little Singapore?
America’s amnesia
Thomas A. Bass
Why the US can’t make an honest film about the war it lost
Deep south
Abby Seiff
Amid the sectarian violence, life in Thailand’s troubled south resembles life everywhere else.
Too much democracy
T.F. Rhoden
Something is missing at the heart of Thai democracy.
On the move
Martin Stuart-Fox
Rapid urbanisation has transformed Laos from a backwater to a regional hub.
Exile wounds
Michael Freeman
Ocean Vuong’s poetry describes a world of memory, desire and violence.
Midday’s children
Rupert Winchester
Two new books labour under the shadow of Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece.
In parentheses
Philip Cornwel-Smith
The enfant terrible of Thai literature breaks rules and conventions to get to the truth
Back to Mandalay
Joseph Woods
How a poem laden with colonial clichés gained such a hold on the Western imagination.
Thread songs
Gill Green
How a French traveller stumbled upon the Miao and their textile culture
Peace matters
Christopher Goscha
How war could have been avoided in Vietnam
Frontier flux
David Eimer
How Aung San Suu Syi has failed to deliver peace to the borderlands of Myanmar.
Khmer ways
Jack Weatherford
Who wrote the only surviving written account of the Khmer Empire?
Narrative change
Michael Freeman
Can fiction help us come to terms with the pending problems of climate change?
Now we’re 50
Ooi Kee Beng
Is ASEAN a miracle? Or just a 50-year-old talkshop?
Intoxicated
Ross West
France extended its power in Vietnam by taking over the production of alcohol.
State rebels
Liam C Kelley
The Chinese outlaws recruited by the Vietnamese Nguyen Dynasty to fight against the French.
Milieu
David Payne
Nineteen young Vietnamese writers are showcased in a new collection of short stories.
On the street
Neil Moody
What is more important in street food – the food or the street?
Pinball wizardy
Rupert Winchester
The multigenerational family saga comes of age in Asia
The Rohingya
Julia Wallace
The long struggle for citizenship
Power and democracy
Sebastian Strangio
Hun Sen and his party have won every election since 1998
Cronies Inc.
Nick Freeman
When Aung San Suu Kyi stopped supporting US sanctions against Myanmar, it changed everything.
Tangled up in red
Chris Taylor
The US love affair with China is marked by cycles of exuberance and deflationary despair.
Unfinished business
Erik W. Davis
Cambodian politics are fundamentally nationalist.
About face
Michael Freeman
When literary critic William Empson turned his attention to Buddhist iconography
Dark mess
Alasdair Richards
Noir is a genre of fiction that delivers so little
Images of war
Oslo Davis
Such A Lovely Little War brings the Vietnam War to new audiences.
Tigerman
Wayne McCallum
Sooyong Park has dedicated much of his life to filming the Siberian tiger
Who is Duch?
Antonia D. Bryan
Duch ran a well-oiled machine. He processed people, personally approving every confession.
The second Panglong trap
David Eimer
In Myanmar’s borderland conflict zones, promises of peace are wearily familiar
Facework
Emma Larkin
How power in Thailand really works
The great leap
Peter Zinoman
Goscha’s Vietnam puts Vietnamese at the centre of their own history.
Wild pigs cannot enter
Giulio Ongaro
The Akha people of Laos once maintained a condition of statelessness.
Ocean of history
John Burgess
A new study questions whether Australian Aborigines were isolated after their arrival 40,000 years ago.
Refugee pain
Rupert Winchester
The Refugee is bold, bright and beautiful.