https://www.scmp.com/rss/509506/feed Kevin Quinn is a teacher, writer and critic. He received his bachelor's degree in English from Yale University with a focus on the modern and contemporary novel and has written for Politico Magazine, thefeministwire.com and the forthcoming cultural quarterly Citizen. He has taught for many years in the United States and Hong Kong and is currently based in San Francisco. en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com “It was a long time since he felt at home anywhere,” the narrator in Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents tells us about a character we meet only in passing but who embodies the sense of displacement almost every character in this novel feels. Most often, that sense of homelessness is the result of being uprooted geographically. At other times, it is born from relationships and situations that wander too far from the safety of certainty. The characters try to make the most of circumstances... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3188568/italian-american-story-migration-suffers-too-many?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3188568/italian-american-story-migration-suffers-too-many?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 13 Aug 2022 11:15:23 +0000 The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka, pub. Knopf Julie Otsuka’s great gift is to telegraph the experience of the individual through a collective voice so delicate one feels there is no permutation of the human condition that cannot be universally felt. The name­less characters in When the Emperor was Divine (Otsuka’s 2002 debut novel), for example, act as chilling ventriloquists of the plight of Japanese-Americans inhumanely contained within internment camps in the 1940s. In The Swimmers, Otsuka’s... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3182938/julie-otsuka-writes-about-dementia-vision-and-wisdom?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3182938/julie-otsuka-writes-about-dementia-vision-and-wisdom?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 25 Jun 2022 11:15:24 +0000 Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart, pub. Picador Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain (2020) was an often heart-rending exploration of a family in 1980s Scotland whose life was splintered by poverty, neglect, alcoholism and deferred dreams. And at the centre of it all was a young boy too attached to his mother to find any room to care for himself – more concerned about her than he could ever be about the fledgling queer self that he could not possibly let bloom. In Young Mungo, Stuart... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3173567/young-mungo-booker-prize-winners-follow-shuggie-bain?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3173567/young-mungo-booker-prize-winners-follow-shuggie-bain?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 09 Apr 2022 11:15:15 +0000 Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong, pub. Penguin Press In Not Even, the poem from which Ocean Vuong’s astonishing new book takes its title, he begs his body to be “more than what I’ll pass through”. He longs for a reality in which a protracted experience with loss (the death of his mother, the end of his relationship, the precarious condition of his mental health against the sting of such traumas) will yield a person who is not broken beyond repair – a person who like the poem tersely concludes,... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3171818/ocean-vuongs-poetry-beautiful-piercing-and-precise?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3171818/ocean-vuongs-poetry-beautiful-piercing-and-precise?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 27 Mar 2022 08:15:21 +0000 Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho, pub. Viking At its best, this collection of related stories is a searching consideration of fractured lives. Though it focuses primarily on protagonists Fiona and Jane, all of the characters are burdened in some way: with nagging questions of identity (cultural, sexual or otherwise); with a weighty sense of familial responsibility; or with the after-effects of psychological trauma. Whether we encounter a mother who has not told her daughter the truth about her... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3165440/asian-american-coming-age-tale-set-la-fiona-and-jane?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3165440/asian-american-coming-age-tale-set-la-fiona-and-jane?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 04 Feb 2022 10:45:12 +0000 Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, pub. Grove Press In almost every novel or film about queer lives in the past 50 years, we are confronted with an exploration of loneliness – in particular, the loneliness felt by queer people who have never been accepted enough that the act of self-acceptance occurs without thought. Without this, the queer person’s road to romantic love is fraught at best. Affairs, often in excess, account for a never-ending search for substance, a search dotted with... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3161532/bestselling-korean-novel-about-young-gay-mans-search?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3161532/bestselling-korean-novel-about-young-gay-mans-search?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 01 Jan 2022 08:15:20 +0000 Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung, pub. One World Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest is a novel about loss. Constructed with admirable inventiveness and whimsy, it tells the story of an unnamed woman born in Hong Kong whose family immigrates to Vancouver, Canada, before the British territory’s 1997 return to China. Her father, however, remains behind, his “astronaut” status (contrasting with “nuclear”, in which all members of the family are together in the same country and residence) typical of families... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3154240/she-grows-vancouver-her-father-stays-hong-kong-only?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3154240/she-grows-vancouver-her-father-stays-hong-kong-only?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 31 Oct 2021 11:45:12 +0000 Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow, pub. Grand Central Publishing In the final moments of this deeply affecting, vividly written memoir, Kat Chow ruminates on what it means to grasp at the memory of someone who, having always been there, is suddenly gone. She is thinking about her dead mother, the primary subject of this book, but her contemplations would be immediately recognisable to anyone who has ever lost a loved one – anyone who has ever grappled with the weightlessness of absence when what the... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/3147370/beautifully-introspective-reckoning-death-kat-chows-memoir?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/3147370/beautifully-introspective-reckoning-death-kat-chows-memoir?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 03 Sep 2021 11:15:21 +0000 The Tiger Mom’s Tale by Lyn Liao Butler, pub. Berkley The title of this novel promises a focus on the figure of the overbearing Chinese mother popularised by Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011). Indeed, the title sets up a scenario in which we might hear from this woman, perhaps to learn what motivates such single-minded pressure to make her children successful. But the novel has nothing to do with this idea, since only one character might be called a tiger mother and the central... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3140418/haphazard-and-title-misleads-tiger-moms-tale-novel?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3140418/haphazard-and-title-misleads-tiger-moms-tale-novel?utm_source=rss_feed Fri, 09 Jul 2021 12:15:07 +0000 The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei. Columbia University Press “Shadows, Momo thought. Everywhere.” Momo is the main character in this philosophically rich, imaginatively potent novel. And her realisation about the “unknowable shadows” of our identity is the chief concern of this eerily prescient work. Written in Chinese and published originally in Taiwan in 1995, the book is available for the first time in English, translated into impressive accessibility by Ari Larissa Heinrich, who also translated... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3137189/membrane-chi-ta-weis-eerily-prescient-novel-terrors?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3137189/membrane-chi-ta-weis-eerily-prescient-novel-terrors?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 14 Jun 2021 12:15:00 +0000 Panthers, Hulks and Ironheartsby Jeffrey A. BrownRutgers University Press If superhero characters have given us anything, it is as a conduit through which we can see ourselves: in the context of each other; in the comfort of our personal but perhaps unvoiced aspirations; and more often than we’d like to admit, as a reflection of our anxieties and insecurities – as scapegoats, in a way, for us to process our fear of the ubiquitous “other”. But the genre that contains these characters, Jeffrey... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3127721/panthers-hulks-and-ironhearts-jeffrey-brown-explores?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3127721/panthers-hulks-and-ironhearts-jeffrey-brown-explores?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 31 Mar 2021 12:45:08 +0000