Rights List SPRING 2014
www.asialiteraryagency.org
Rights List SPRING 2014
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
As the attention of the UK’s publishing community shifts to the Korean peninsula, the market focus for this year’s London Book Fair, it is with great excitement and pride that I present the spring 2014 rights list from the Asia Literary Agency, representing the best authors from across Asia. !
!Both North and South
Korea feature predominantly in our list: the electrifying memoir of North Korean refugee Hyeonseo Lee; the completely revised and updated The New Koreans by Michael Breen; and the Bright Young Thing of South Korean literature, Han Yujoo, whose Impossible Fairytale will be published in France in 2014; in The
Soju Club, Tim Fitts, offers a hilarious account of dysfunctional family life, lost causes and lastchance saloons in South Korea.!
!As a former Korean
linguist with the US military, the divided peninsula has always been an area of interest to me. I hope you will find, in these pages, stories that will take you right to the heart of contemporary Korean culture on both sides of the border.!
!This, our second London
us and we look forward to continuing our partnership with them. !
!
You will also see towards the end of this list the rights available from Typhoon Media, a Hong Kong-based publisher represented by us. !
!
This brochure aims takes you on a journey across our region, showcasing the best of stories waiting to be told from a rising Asia. !
!
Kelly Falconer! Asia Literary Agency! Hong Kong
Book Fair, also marks our one year anniversary with Pontas Literary & Film Agency based out of Barcelona. !
!Founder of Pontas, Anna
Soler-Pont, and her team of agents have been selling European rights for
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
ASIA LITERARY AGENCY Fiction
SPRING 2014
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Tew Bunnag
Curtain of Rain The Time of the Lotus
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Tim Fitts
Sea Bean: Short Stories
The Soju Club: A Novel
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! Han Yujoo ! Ayesha Heble ! Esther Kofod ! Ming Liu ! ! ! !
Impossible Fairytale Third Person Singular The Libyan Our Man in China
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
TEW BUNNAG Rights Sold:
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- Metropoli d’Asia, Italian
- River Books, English
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Curtain of Rain
World Rights Available (ex. Italian and English) Two lives, fatefully interlinked; two sets of memories, in danger of being lost. !
!Clare Stone’s past has
suddenly caught up with her. When a longsuppressed memory comes vividly alive, she finds herself being pulled back to the place of its origin: Bangkok.
There, she meets Tarrin Wandee, the writer whose book has unsettled her. But have they met before, all those years ago, when she was young, idealistic and dangerously naïve?
All our lives are linked; it’s just a question of how.
!Atmospheric and
moody, Curtain of Rain is a story of politics, power and greed, and the search for meaning, and And so their stories unfold, redemption. in a steady rhythm between the past and the present, fiction and reality, in relief against the pulsating backdrop of Bangkok itself.
About the author
Also available
Tew Bunnag comes from a prominent Thai family, graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Chinese and Economics, works in the Bangkok slums with Father Joe, and divides his time between Thailand and Spain. He is a Buddhist, a T'ai Chi and Meditation Master and a grief counsellor who provides palliative care for the families of terminally ill children.!
- Fragile Days - Collection of short stories! - The Naga’s Journey! - After the Wave - Collection of short stories! - Time of the Lotus - An MBS bestseller published in Spanish by Comanegra
! !
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
TEW BUNNAG Rights Sold:
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- Comenegra, Spanish
The Time of the Lotus
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
World Rights Available (ex. Spain) Set initially in a one-room shack in the Bangkok slums, this is a fable about the search for nirvana in the modern world, about the meaning of life and death, and how one cannot exist without the other."
moments. And when he feels elated, rather than sad, at her cremation, he decides to bury his feelings deep inside, and focus his energies on his education, and future, promising himself that he will move himself and his mother away from the slums.!
she misses her friends and their simpler way of life, but also because she sees the sadness in her son's eyes, and the emptiness of the way they live now.!
!It is only when Siri unpacks
a box of keepsakes that he begins to contemplate the meaning of his own life, When ten-year-old Siri's The years pass and he come to terms with his elder sister, Pi Nit dies from fulfils his promise: he and emotions, and with the Dengue Fever, he blacks his mother live well, in a death of his sister, and out at the moment of her wonderfully expensive prompts him to reject the death. Unable to cry or modern house in the material world. What did he grieve when he is is suburbs. He has more find amongst the roused, he is befuddled money than he knows what keepsakes? The framed and embarrassed by his to do with, and is drawing of a lotus flower conflicting emotions, and constantly busy with work; his sister had made so by the peace he saw on his however, his mother is many years ago. sister's face during her last unhappy, not only because
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!
About the author
Also available
Tew Bunnag comes from a prominent Thai family, graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Chinese and Economics, works in the Bangkok slums with Father Joe, and divides his time between Thailand and Spain. He is a Buddhist, a T'ai Chi and Meditation Master and a grief counsellor who provides palliative care for the families of terminally ill children.!
- Fragile Days - Collection of short stories! - The Naga’s Journey! - After the Wave - Collection of short stories! - Curtain of Rain - To be published in Italian by Metropoli d’Asia and in English by River Books in 2014
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
TIM FITTS
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Sea Bean: Short Stories World Rights Available An excerpt of Sea Bean, published by Granta:!
‘I like the snow,’ Arlene said, as if this matter had been bugging her for years, and ‘The roofs are going to give,’ she had finally come to Fred said. ‘You’ve got two terms with this issue. feet of snow up there. Harrison agreed with Arlene Where’s it going to go?’ Fred and said that the only time popped an olive in his mouth people were nice in South and rolled it into his cheek. Philly was when it snowed. ‘People la-di-da this shit, but He corrected himself and they don’t think about things said that people were like that.’ Fred helped always nice, but when it himself to more wine and snows, they were helpful poured a glass for his wife, nice.! Arlene, who measured her hand halfway up the glass.! Harrison and Michelle had lived in the neighbourhood
!
!
for almost five years. This was their first blizzard, and it was the first time anyone from the street had come over for dinner. Harrison looked at Michelle. ‘I guess it’ll melt, right?’ Harrison said.!
!‘Where’s the fucking snow
going to go up there?’ Fred said. ‘The roofs are flat.’!
!Arlene told Fred to watch his mouth.
About the author After receiving a special mention from the Pushcart Prize in 2013, Tim Fitts’ stories are being picked up everywhere - including Granta magazine.
!He has another two short stories to be published,
in New Madrid and Shenandoah, and has gathered a collection of these stories now: Sea Bean (working title).
!! !
Tim has also written Of Missing Ashville - meaty and dark - a novel of two halves, of before and after. The story of an accidental murder and its consequence, it riffs on John Cage and Steve Reich, on life and fate, on forgiveness and retribution. It is the tale of the nothingness of one boy's life and of small-town American dystopia.
!The other: The Soju Club - a totally entertaining, mad-cap adventure, written in homage to John Fante's cult classic, Brotherhood of the Grape.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
TIM FITTS
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
The Soju Club: A Novel World Rights Available The Soju Club by Tim Fitts, who in 2013 received a special mention from the Pushcart Prize. "
Part Augusten Burroughs part Woody Allen part Carl Hiaasen and Nick Hornby with a dash of Andrey Kurkov, it’s the story of a Inspired by John middle-aged man who gets Fante's Brotherhood of the roped into going on one Grape, Tim says that ‘by last fishing voyage with his the second or third chapter, the novel took on alcoholic father. Set in South Korea, the a life of its own, and now protagonist, Lee Won-Ho, the similarities between and his father’s drinking the two novels are about the same as Catcher in the buddies head out to the Rye and Huck Finn.’" fertile fishing waters off Dokdo (an island of
!
!
disputed territory), where the father and his friends stage an ‘impromptu’ attack on a Japanese fishing boat… and with Molotov a belated addition to the cocktail menu.! The Soju Club is a hilarious account of dysfunctional family life, lost causes and last-chance saloons. It is laugh-out-loud funny, at times poignant, and always so well observed.
About the author After receiving a special mention from the Pushcart Prize in 2013, Tim Fitts’ stories are being picked up everywhere - including Granta magazine.
!He has another two short stories to be published,
in New Madrid and Shenandoah, and has gathered a collection of these stories now: Sea Bean (working title).
!!
Tim has also written Of Missing Ashville - meaty and dark - a novel of two halves, of before and after. The story of an accidental murder and its consequences, it riffs on John Cage and Steve Reich, on life and fate, on forgiveness and retribution. It is the tale of the nothingness of one boy's life and of small-town American dystopia.
!
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
HAN YUJOO With the publication of her first novel, Impossible Fairytale, Han has at age thirtyone cemented her reputation as a writer.
Rights Sold:
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- Decrescenzo, France
- Moonji, S. Korea
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Professor Bruce Fulton Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Studies, University of British Columbia
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Impossible Fairytale
World Rights Available (ex. France & South Korea) 'You visited me like a dream.'
!The child who stepped out of the story opened the door and came in. This is either impossible or not impossible.’
Korean fiction in the new millennium is more imaginative than ever before, and no Korean writer is more imaginative than Han Yujoo.
!Impossible Fairytale is !Combining the recursive flow of the Korean oral nothing less than a metafiction masterpiece, from THE Bright Young Thing of Korean Literature, Han Yujoo.
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tradition with glimpses of the evil that threatens to poke through the stiff fabric of centuries of neoConfucian social control, stories such as “Blackand-White Photographer”
and “Ash Wednesday” challenge readers, critics, and writers alike to push the boundaries of an elite literary tradition that risks being swept into desuetude before the wave of Korean popular culture that is washing over the world.
!
Prof. Bruce Fulton
About the author Han Yujoo debuted in 2003 with her short story To the Moon, which won Literature and Society's New Writers Award. Impossible Fairytale, has recently been published by Moonji, Korea, which has also published her three collections of short stories: To the Moon, Book of Ice and My Left Hand the King My Right Hand the King's Scribe. !
! ! !
Yujoo read German literature at Seoul National University, and has translated the works of Geoff Dyer and Michael Ondaatje into Korean. She won the prestigious Hankook Ilbo Literary Award in 2009 and currently teaches at the Seoul Institute of the Arts. The French translation of Impossible Fairytale will be published by Decrescenzo in 2014.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
AYESHA HEBLE
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Third Person Singular World Rights Available Third Person Singular, the most wonderful debut from Ayesha Heble, who was shortlisted for the 2013 Tibor Jones Prize with this novel -- a sublimely perceptive tale of solipsism, selfinvolvement and, eventually, selfawareness and redemption."
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Third Person Singular is a comedy of manners and semantic manipulation set on a fictitious university campus somewhere in Delhi. "
! !
When an ambitious young reporter misquotes a university professor in an effort to make the headlines, and a name for herself, all hell breaks loose. Her question, only tangentially related to the interview topic – the decline of the Indian publishing industry – draws the professor of sociology into commenting on whether he thinks The Satanic Verses should be banned, or not. Students riot, buses are burned and classes suspended – not only because of the disruption caused by the controversy but also because there aren’t enough qualified teachers available, due to a pending lawsuit brought against the university by an
aggrieved former faculty member.!
!Everyone is caught in
suspended animation – no one moves forward, no one looks back. No one sees the other side of the story. Instead, they all focus only on their own self-interested agendas.! ! ‘Whenever an issue arose with diametrically opposing stands taken, there usually was a third position, if only someone had the courage to express it. Instead, people felt obliged to take sides, you were either for or else you were against, and somewhere in the middle the truth escaped. There was no truth; only positions…’!
About the author Ayesha Heble, herself a university English lecturer, gives us dialogue that is believable but at the same time archly ironic, with narrative interludes worthy of Oscar Wilde and characters who entertain us with their faults and failings.!
Shortlisted for the 2013 Tibor Jones South Asia Prize.
!! !
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
ESTHER KOFOD
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
The Libyan
World Rights Available A vivid account of the lives and culture of Libya during the early years of Muammar Gaddafi's ruthless dictatorship.
When they begin their married life in Libya, Lina finds herself in a country terrorised by random arrests and public hangings. Driven by his longing for a better Libya, The Libyan, a fictionalised Kamal struggles to memoir, tells the story of survive politically while the tumultuous Lina lives in fear of her relationship of Lina, a husband being beautiful and imprisoned - or killed. sophisticated American, and the enigmatic Kamal, As Gaddafi transforms the a patriotic Libyan, two richest nation in Africa into people from different the most repressed and worlds, bound together by brutalised country in the passion and fate. Arab world, Kamal battles
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to realise his dream for Libya's future.
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And when he is forced to leave his beloved country to become a hunted dissident, Kamal realises he must choose between the woman he loves, and his love for Libya.
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About the author Esther Kofod was born in Singapore of a Chinese mother and a Swiss father. After completing her studies in Singapore and Switzerland, Esther attended university in the United States. She then returned to Singapore to work for an international advertising agency as a copywriter and creative director.
Esther was married to the Chairman of the Strategic Studies Center who also acted as Foreign Advisor to Muammar Gaddafi in Tripoli, Libya. They lived in Libya for five years before being forced to leave for political reasons.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
MING LIU Ming Liu is one of the most talented young writers ! I've ever had the privilege ! to teach.!
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M J Hyland! author of How the Light Gets In
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Our Man in China
World Rights Available* Dangerous, dark, dissolute, Our Man in China is the Wall Street meets Bonfire of the Vanities of the twentyfirst century...!
!
When American-BornChinese Eric Chen returns to China, he believes he's returning to the motherland. A junior vicepresident at Goldberg Brothers, he's working overtime to make a name for himself... but he soon realises he's in over his head, because being an ABC is a distinct
disadvantage in the new China, where the Chinese are making up the rules, and then discarding them, as they go along. ! Determined to win a takeover deal that sees him shuttle between Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and New York, Eric meets all those others profiting from the world's next superpower: the troubled playboy son of Hong Kong's richest tycoon, a hedonistic, arrogant boss, and Joanna, another ABC desperate to belong. Cultural
assimilation and confusion, temptation and greed and seduction abound in this new China, where it's easy fail, and more difficult to succeed -- especially if you're an outsider.! What are the barriers and boundaries when you don't even know who you are, or where you came from, or where your place in the world should be?
About the author Ming Liu is a journalist at the Financial Times in London and has contributed to China International Business, V magazine and the Asia Literary Review. She has also reported for the NBC Today Show. Born in the United States, she moved to Asia at the age of six, and spent a peripatetic childhood in China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, eventually returning to the US to study sociology and
economics at Wellesley College. In 2011, she received her masters in creative writing from the University of Manchester. She divides her time between London and Beijing. !
! !
*NB: Originally self-published in January 2013
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
ASIA LITERARY AGENCY " Non-Fiction " SPRING 2014 " " Sumit Basu Pilgrimage: Banaras Photographs " Michael Breen The New Koreans " Michael Buckley Meltdown in Tibet " Kate Coleman 7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership " Charles Lau
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Hyeonseo Lee
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Leza Lowitz
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Ira Trivedi
" Angelo Paratico "
Michael Vatikiotis
Hustling for a Living: The 100-Pound Gangster
The Girl in the Red Shoes: A North Korean Defector’s Tale Here Comes the Sun: A Journey to Midlife Motherhood India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st Century In Praise of Nero Dust and the Essence of Lemons: A Levantine Family History 1845-1945
" "
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
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SUMIT BASU
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Pilgrimage: Banaras Photographs World Rights Available With an introduction from Emeritus Professor Partha Mitter, Pilgrimage is a wonderfully atmospheric book of black-and-white photographs taken by Sumit Basu over the course of his many visits to the holiest of holy cities.!
!! !! !
Sumit has written an engaging, thoughtful few words on Varanasi to accompany the images.!
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Sumit's talent and vision clearly rivals the heavily stylized but famous photographs taken of Varanasi by the American photographer, Michael Ackerman, in End Time City. !
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There is no other comparable book about Varanasi on the market, not least with an endorsement from someone as recognisable and authoritative as Professor Mitter. !
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Pilgrimage has great potential to reach an international audience.!
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Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
MICHAEL BREEN
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
The New Koreans World Rights Available The rise of South Korea was one of the most unexpected and inspirational developments of the latter part of the twentieth century. A few decades ago, the Koreans were an impoverished, agricultural people. In one generation they came out of the fields and into Silicon Valley. !
! ! ! ! !
In 1997, this powerhouse of a nation reeled and almost collapsed as a result of a weak financial system and heavily indebted conglomerates. Fifteen years later and Korea has been reborn afresh in the world's mind through the rise of K-Pop and PSY's Gangnam Style.!
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How did this divided country rise so dramatically and so successfully to become a key player on the global stage, both economically
and culturally, whilst maintaining a de facto state of war with North Korea?!
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This updated and completely revised version of Michael Breen's hugely popular and groundbreaking, The Koreans, provides an indepth portrait of the country and its people, told by a writer who has lived and worked in the country for over two decades. !
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About the author Michael Breen has lived in South Korea for thirty years. He served for many years as Seoul correspondent for the Guardian and The Washington Times. He now runs his own public relations and consultancy firm in Seoul, and frequently writes essays, commentaries and features for the local media. He is the author of The Koreans and Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader. He is currently
working on a biography of the controversial figure, Rev. Moon, founder of the Unification Church.!
!
Michael is also the co-author of the forthcoming memoir The Girl in the Red Shoes by North Korean refugee Hyeonseo Lee, due to be published by HarperCollins in October 2014.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
MICHAEL BUCKLEY Rights Sold:
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- Palgrave Macmillan, English
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Meltdown in Tibet
World Rights Available (ex. English language) ! The new book, a disaster guide to the environmental crisis looming in Tibet, comes to us from the journalist who co-wrote the first ever guidebook to Tibet in 1986 for Lonely Planet.!
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Meltdown in Tibet totally blows the lid off what the Chinese have been doing to secure access and control of water throughout most of Asia, including completely defiling the most holy of holy lakes in Tibet. !
Oil? That's yesterday's news. The repercussions of what Michael unveils are simply shocking.!
Tibetans have experienced waves of genocide since the 1950s. Now they are facing ecocide – the reckless The Chinese are, in effect, destruction of their fragile destroying holy sites in high-altitude environment.! Tibet just as the Taliban destroyed ancient relics in With never before seen Afghanistan. This is all photographs and original completely under the detailed maps, Meltdown radar, very few people will show readers the know about this top-secret ruthless realities campaign that implicates threatening Tibet, the rest the West, also, as they of South-East Asia and have been supplying the the world. ! machinery to make this happen. !
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! ! !
About the author Michael Buckley is a travel writer and photographer who has travelled extensively throughout South-East Asia. !
to Indochina titled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; Tibet: the Bradt Travel Guide, and Heartlands: Travels in the Tibetan World. !
He is author or co-author of ten books about Asian and Himalayan travel, including Eccentric Explorers, a biography-based book about ten wacky adventurers to the Tibetan plateau; Shangri-La: A Travel Guide to the Himalayan Dream; a guidebook
Michael has contributed to a wide variety of magazines and newspapers including the Guardian, BBC Wildlife and TIME magazine.!
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
KATE COLEMAN
7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
World Rights Available 7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership grew out of the highly popular seven-day courses Kate Coleman organised and presented with Next Leadership, the organisation she cofounded. The book is all about women and leadership with, as Kate says, 'a clear Christian ethos and some biblical content'.!
! ! !
What are the 7 Deadly Sins?!
!1 Limiting self-perceptions -- Adjust how you see yourself!
!2 Failure to draw the line -Establish appropriate boundaries!
!3 Inadequate personal vision -- Develop and maintain a God-inspired vision!
!4 Too little life in the work -- Establish a healthy work-life rhythm!
5 Everybody's friend, nobody's leader -- Defeat the 'disease to please'!
!6 Colluding and not
confronting -- Deal with men and women behaving badly!
!7 Neglect in family matters -- Be intentional with your nearest and dearest!
!This book will enable you
to identify and overcome self-defeating patterns of behaviour, in ways that will radically transform your leadership capabilities.
About the author Rev. Dr. Kate Coleman is Chair of the 60-million strong Evangelical Alliance, and is a popular preacher, teacher, speaker, lecturer and strategic adviser in the UK, Europe and Africa. Kate is recognised as one of the most influential Christian women leaders in the UK. She contributes to Christian and mainstream press, radio and TV. ! Praise for 7 Deadly Sins! ‘This is a "must-read" book for anyone in leadership, including those who wonder how they got there! In her perceptive examination, Kate Coleman uncovers what
so often lies hidden in this area, and places it firmly on the agenda. It's rare to find such careful research, gripping narrative and positive mentoring all in one book. I loved it!' Elaine Storkey, president of Tear Fund! ‘Thank God for 7 Deadly Sins of Women in Leadership! I am convinced this book will help equip women in leadership to hone their craft, enabling them to “swim” rather than “sink" as leaders. It is a timely and essential resource for women leaders across all sectors.' Grace Owen, Career Coach and author of The Career Itch.!
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Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
CHARLES LAU* Shocking and often scary – it’s like Gomorrah, but HD.
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Hustling for a Living: The 100-Pound Gangster 'A good friend will bail you out of jail. A real friend will be in jail next to you saying, “Man, we fucked up.”’
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Charles Lau has spent most of his precocious young life involved with the international criminal underworld. By the age of 14 he was a member of a notorious San Francisco triad with links to Hong Kong and China. And by the age of 18 he had seen, and done, more than most have in a lifetime.
alive, and earn respect from his peers. But when he finds out that his grandfather was Chief of the Chinese secret service, and was one of the five most powerful and well-connected men in China until his death two years ago, Charles discovers that he has descended from a kind of underworld aristocracy.
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After being sent to dubious reform schools in an attempt to rehabilitate him, Charles was eventually Unsure of himself, and incarcerated as a his place in the world, he juvenile, and sentenced fought to keep himself to eight years in one of
!
toughest prisons in the USA. It was there that he realised his internal compass had been pointing him in the wrong direction, and through a writing workshop called The Beat Within, he learned to channel his theretofore misplaced energies into writing, slowly reflecting on his demons, and sending him on the road to redemption.
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This is a powerful, and brutally honest tale of the loyalty and loneliness of gang life.
!
*not his real name
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
HYEONSEO LEE Rights Sold:
!
- Rosinante, Danish
- The House of Books, Dutch
- HarperCollins, English
- Otava, Finnish
- Les èditions Stock, French! - Heyne/Random House, German! - Libri Kiado, Hungarian! - Mondadori, Italian
- Daiwa Shobo, Japanese
- Proszynski Media, Polish
- Grupo Planeta, Portuguese [Portugal only]
- Península/Grupo Planeta, Spanish
- Emily Books, Taiwan
!
RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
!
kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
The Girl in the Red Shoes: A North Korean Defector’s Tale
World Rights Available (ex. Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese [Portugal only], Spanish and Taiwan for Traditional Chinese) When Hyeonseo Lee illicitly leaves North Korea to visit distant relatives in China, little does she know it will be fourteen years until she is reunited with her family. At the time of her departure, she is a naïve seventeen-year-old girl who believes North Korea is the best place in the world to live, and that Kim Il-Sung is her saviour.! In a land of constant surveillance, her absence is soon noted, and it is her own mother who advises her to stay away, lest her return
incur the punishment of the government authorities – imprisonment, torture, public execution – not only for Hyeonseo, but also for her family.! This is the story not only of Hyeonseo’s escape – absolutely literally from the darkness into the light – but also of her coming of age, of her ‘re-education’, of her ability to successfully rebuild her life not once but twice – first in China, then in South Korea, which proved to be the more difficult and unsettling of the two.!
Thousands of refugees and escapees pour out of North Korea but thousands also struggle to adapt, and rarely do they thrive as she has. None are able to tell their story with such eloquence, so thoughtfully and truthfully. They are still afraid – unlike Hyeonseo, who has become a strong and brave voice of the North Korean refugee community.!
! Co-written by Michael Breen, author of The New Koreans
About the author Hyeonseo Lee is a North Korean refugee living in Seoul, South Korea. She is a Young Leader at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and in addition to pursuing an undergraduate degree in English and Chinese at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, she spends much of her time speaking about North Korean human rights and refugee issues.!
!
In February 2013 she gave a TED talk that received an overwhelming and positive response, with over 3 million views, and counting.! ! Hyeonseo has written for the Wall Street Journal, the LSE Big Ideas blog, and for the South Korean Ministry of Unification. She aims to start an organization to provide assistance to North Korean refugees.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
LEZA LOWITZ
Winner of the 2013/14 Asia Pacific American Award for Young Adult Fiction
Here Comes the Sun: A Journey to Midlife Motherhood
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
!
kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
World Rights Available At 30, Californian Leza Lowitz is single and travelling the world, which suits her just fine. Why rush to settle down? Coming of age in Berkeley, California, during the social, feminist and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, she learned that marriage and family could wait. Or could they? !
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When she moves to Japan and meets the man of her dreams, her heart opens in ways she never thought possible. And when she approaches 40 – the same age as her mother when she had left the family behind to ‘find herself’ – Lowitz yearns for a child. But attempts to
become pregnant fail repeatedly and Lowitz begins to question whether motherhood is really in the cards for her. Are there physical issues, psychological blocks, or both? And just exactly what does it mean to become a mother, after all? Is she ready to make the sacrifices necessary? And can she finally heal the wounds that have kept motherhood at bay?!
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After much soul-searching, and a process of healing that takes her home to San Francisco, then to New York and back to Tokyo (with a stopover in India on the way), Lowitz comes to a deepening
understanding of what motherhood truly means. At the age of 44, she and her husband begin the laboriously bureaucratic process of adopting a child in Japan, where bloodlines are paramount and family ties almost feudal in their cultural importance. !
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Here Comes the Sun is the story of how one woman learns to conquer her fears, blast through the limits she has created for herself, and those she perceived around her, and how she becomes the confident woman, and mother, she’d always hoped she would be.
About the author
Also available
Leza lives in Tokyo with her husband, the writer Shogo Oketani and their eight-year-old son. She has been running her own (very popular!) yoga studio there for a decade, and travels around Japan and Asia to teach yoga, and write. Her debut Young Adult novel Jet Black and the Ninja Wind (the first of a trilogy published by Tuttle this autumn) is about a female ninja and her fight to save her native tribe. !
Up from the Sea! When a 140-foot wave swallows up half your village, how do you manage to stay whole?
!Leza has published 17 books. She’s the author
of Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By, which has been translated into four languages as is one of the highest selling poetry books on Amazon.!
!
!That’s the question fifteen-year-old Kai Takamoto asks himself after a tsunami sweeps over his sleepy seaside town in Up from the Sea.
!Written in the Japanese poetic form of haibun, Up From The Sea is a YA novel in verse in the tradition of Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust and Jame Richards’ Three Rivers Rising.
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Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
IRA TRIVEDI ! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! !! ! !
RIGHTS SOLD - Aleph Book Company, India
RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
!
kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st Century World Rights Available (ex. India) A ground-breaking look at the sexual revolution sweeping through urban India.
unprecedented insights into how the nation has sex, gets married and falls in (and out of) love in the 21st century.
Trivedi travelled from Shillong in the northeast to Chennai in the south, Konark in the east to Mumbai in the west and over a dozen other cities and towns, in order to gain
opening reportage with hundreds of interviews, detailed research, authoritative published surveys and discussions with experts on various aspects of sexuality and
!Bestselling author Ira
!Supporting her eye-
marriage, Trivedi has written a book that is often startling, sometimes controversial, but always entertaining and original.
About the author Ira Trivedi is the bestselling author of What Would You Do to Save the World?, The Great Indian Love Story and There Is No Love on Wall Street.
the Telegraph (India). She regularly speaks to students and youth groups across the country on various inspirational and motivational topics.
Ira, who writes in English and Hindi, contributes to a wide variety of publications including Foreign Affairs, Hindustan Times Brunch, Forbes, Outlook, Daily News & Analysis (DNA), The Asian Age and
She has lived all over the world: in four countries, nine cities and three continents. She graduated from Wellesley College with a BA in economics and gained her MBA from Columbia Business School, where she won the prestigious Feldberg Fellowship.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
ANGELO PARATICO
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
!
kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
In Praise of Nero
World Rights Available Four and half centuries ago, Girolamo Cardano, a polymath in the mould of Leonardo da Vinci, wrote a spirited defense of the Roman emperor, Nero, commonly held to be a monster and murderer, who fiddled while Rome burned and then blamed it all on Christians. He titled it Encomium Neronis – that is to say, a work in praise of Nero. To escape censure and accusations of heresy, he pretended it was just a rhetorical exercise."
! ! About the author Angelo Paratico grew up in a small town outside Milan and moved to Hong Kong in the early 1980s. He is a freelance journalist contributing to several newspapers in Italy and to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. !
Through astute historiography, only duplicated recently, Cardano, a man of immense erudition, saw clearly that Tacitus and Suetonius, the sources on which every biographer had relied, were biased and partial.! Perhaps he found in Nero a kindred spirit, for Cardano had himself been the victim of slander on the occasion of his son’s execution.! The importance of the work lies in its being one of the first works of actual historiography involving critical reading of sources.! Nero is not what is important here: there are other histories, including revisionist ones and,
anyway, if one wanted to write a history of Nero, one wouldn't just translate Cardano. So the key, important aspect of the book is not Nero, but Cardano himself, e.g. where he sits in Western intellectual progress.! It’s also interesting because it involves a critical review of classical texts: previous to this, these were all ‘pagan’ and viewed threw the lens of religious orthodoxy; then in the Renaissance, classical writers could do no wrong -they were the arbiters of taste, style and truth.! Cardano takes a more analytical view, which makes this book an important indication of intellectual progress.!
Angelo read classics at the Universita Statale of Milan and published a book of poetry in 1982, Rendiconto Giovanile. ! Ben, his conspiracy novel/thriller about Il Duce, the SOE and Winston Churchill is published in Italian by Mursia.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
MICHAEL VATIKIOTIS
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RIGHTS CONTACT: Kelly Falconer Asia Literary Agency Hong Kong
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kelly@asialiteraryagency,org
Dust and the Essence of Lemons: A Levantine Family History 1845-1945 World Rights Available The Middle East is understood today through the lens of unending conflict and violence. Lost in the litany of perpetual strife are the layers of culture and civilization that accumulated over centuries, giving the region its cosmopolitan identity. ! It was once a region known as the Levant, a reference to the East, where the sun rose. There was above all
an affinity with three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This was a time when Arabs and Jews would rub shoulders together in bazaars and teashops, worked and played together, and intermarried. ! Michael’s family was a product of this now forgotten pluralist tradition. By tracing their roots and compiling a picture of how they lived, Michael revives
a memory of that more peaceful time, and along with it something that may be used for future dialogue.! The idea for this book was born one hot evening in Amman where Michael was a guest of Prince Hassan of Jordan, a friend of Michael’s late father, the eminent historian of the Middle East, P. J. Vatikiotis.
About the author Michael Vatikiotis has worked for the Bangkok Post and for the BBC World Service, and was the Managing Editor and Editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.! He is currently the Asia Regional Director of the Center for Humanitarian Dialogue, based in Singapore.!
!He has written numerous articles for books and
journals, and his own books of fiction and non-fiction
include Indonesian Politics under Suharto, Political Change in Southeast Asia: Trimming the Banyan Tree, Debatable Land: Stories from Southeast Asia, The Spice Garden and, most recently, The Painter of Lost Souls.! Michael has a PhD from Oxford University and in 2005 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Maryland.
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
ASIA LITERARY AGENCY Typhoon Media
" SPRING 2014
"" Nigel Collett " Kirk Kjeldsen " Marshall Moore " Chris Tharp " Yu Jihui " " " " " "
"
Firelight of a Different Colour Tomorrow City Bitter Orange Dispatches from the Peninsula The Gunners of Shenyang
Asia Literary Agency Rights List - SPRING 2014 - www.asialiteraryagency.org
Signal8Press
When Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing threw himself to his death from the terrace of Hong Kong’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel in 2003, he was the greatest star of his generation in the city. A performer loved for his character as much as for his magic as an entertainer, his death sent shock waves across Asia and amongst Asian populations around the world. Despite the fact that he was openly gay, he was adored, and remains adored, by multitudes in societies where his sexual orientation remains a littlediscussed taboo. Firelight of a Different Colour traces Leslie’s story from birth in 1950s Hong Kong to his death during the city’s crippling SARS epidemic. Through initial struggles to gain a foothold in TV and the nascent world of Cantopop, he achieved final success as a megastar of music and the big screen and held that position for nearly two decades. At the forefront of almost all the cultural changes Hong Kong saw during his lifetime, Leslie came to embody the unique spirit of the city. No Western performer can boast so widespread an influence across so many arts. Firelight of a Different Colour commemorates a life that continues to amaze and inspire.
Exhaustively researched and beautifully written, Nigel Collett's book is a perfectly fitting tribute to an incredible talent who was lost too soon. Essential reading for any serious student of Asian cinema or queer cinema. -- Matthew Hays, author, journalist and film studies professor, Concordia University
Signal8Press Publication date: Feb. 25, 2014 Print edition: 5.5" x 8.5" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 460 ISBN: 978-988-15542-6-0 Price (paper): US$18.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 111,000 eISBN: 978-988-15542-0-8 Price (e-book): US$9.99
© Typhoon Media Limited 2013
Nigel Collett studied history at St Peter’s College, Oxford and biography at the University of Buckingham. After serving for twenty years in the British Army, a career that culminated in the command of 6th Queen Elizabeth’s Own Gurkha Rifles, he founded the Gurkha International Group, which finds employment for Nepalese men and women, principally as crew for cruise lines. His publications include A Grammar, Phrase Book and Vocabulary of Baluchi (1984) and An English-Nepali-English Dictionary (1994). He is the author of The Butcher of Amritsar, a life of Brigadier Dyer, the perpetrator of the Amritsar massacre, published in 2005. Currently, he is a correspondent for Fridae.asia, Asia's largest LGBT news and social networking website, and writes for the English edition of China Daily. In 2008 he was appointed English Secretary of the Pink Alliance, Hong Kong's largest grouping of LGBT organizations and in 2011 helped found Hong Kong's annual Pink Season. Also in 2008, he was cofounder and coordinator of the Tongzhi Literary Group, a group aiming to foster writing on LGBT subjects or by LGBT authors, both in Chinese and English. He is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.
Signal8Press
Tomorrow City a novel by KIRK
KJELDSEN
After an armored car robbery goes horribly wrong and leaves four people dead, young ex-con Brendan Lavin flees New York City and attempts to start over again in Shanghai. But twelve years later, after opening a bakery under an assumed name and starting a family with a local woman, his former colleagues show up and force Brendan to assist in another armed robbery, of a wealthy diamond merchant. If he doesn’t cooperate, they’ll expose him and kill his family. Will Brendan help them pull it off and keep his new life intact? Or will his past bring him down, destroying everything else along with it? Tomorrow City is a riveting, literary crime novel that explores the theme of reinvention in Shanghai, the city that’s reinvented itself more than any other in the world over the past generation.
A tight, tense crime novel about a stranger in a strange land trying to outrun the ghosts of his past. Kirk Kjeldsen’s Shanghai is a terrifically fresh and evocative setting, and the action jumps off the page. - Lou Berney, Edgar Award and Barry Awardnominated author of Whiplash River and Gutshot Straight
Tomorrow City is a vicious little tale of men and violence and the sucking black hole of the past. A coiled and sleek throwback noir, best read in one shot. More please. - Elwood Reid, author of If I Don’t Six, Midnight Sun, and D.B.
Publication date: 8/27/2013 Print edition: 5" x 8" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 200 ISBN: 978-988-15542-1-5 Price (paper): US$15.95 Tomorrow City unfolds with grace and power, E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF building to a cinematic climax that Word count: 40,000 reverberates long after you’ve finished eISBN: 978-988-15542-5-3 reading. This is thriller writing at its finest. Price (e-book): US$6.99 Kjeldsen is one to watch. - Carlo Bernard, screenwriter of The Great Raid, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and The Uninvited © Typhoon Media Limited 2013
SIGNAL8PRESS Bitter Orange by Marshall Moore Seth Harrington can be invisible or undetectable, but he is not a superhero. The ability only works in morally grey situations; the rest of the time, he can’t turn it on and off at will. He can use a movie ticket stub to buy a coffee or a one-dollar bill to pay for a cell phone. He can stop muggings in plain sight, unseen, but only with worse violence. But this only adds to his confusion about his place in the world. Still reeling from the horrors of the September 11 terrorist attacks and ambivalent about his future, Seth is at a crossroads: Can he be one of the good guys by doing bad things, or are his newfound powers part of someone else’s malevolent agenda? There are no easy answers or expected outcomes in Marshall Moore’s exploration of urban life and the ways that people can disappear.
Bitter Orange is a dark wonder. Like Palahniuk at his best, Moore makes the impossible seem credible, grounding the fantastical elements of his tale with the foibles of human frailty. His characters live and breathe, and they will carry you along on this amazing, bizarre, and ultimately disturbing journey. – Lee Thomas, Lambda Literary Award-winning author of The German and Ash Street
With Bitter Orange, Marshall Moore gives us a queer Crimes and Misdemeanors, darkly witty and equally wise. – Tom Cardamone, author of Green Thumb and editor of The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered Publication date: March 24, 2013
Marshall Moore has created a fully realized character in Seth Harrington, whose ennui has rendered him nearly motionless. The inner monologue and introspection explode once Seth realizes he has the power of invisibility and psychic projection, but this character study of a hipster in crisis is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read before. More than just a “superhero” story, Bitter Orange examines how urban life, past tragedy, seemingly inconsequential choices, and things left unsaid can alter one’s trajectory.
Print edition: 5.5″ x 8.5″ perfect bound trade paperback
– Collin Kelley, author of Conquering Venus and Remain In Light
Price (e-book): US$7.99
Page count: 194 ISBN: 978-988-15540-3-1 Price (paper): US$16.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 50,000 eISBN: 978-988-15540-7-9
© Typhoon Media Limited 2013
Dispatches from the Peninsula by Chris Tharp
C
hris Tharp lives in Busan, South Korea, where he teaches, plays rock and roll and performs stand-up comedy. His award-winning writing has appeared online at such sites as Travelers’ Tales, Road Junky Travel, Matador Travel, and Monkey Goggles. He is a regular columnist for Busan Haps magazine and maintains his own blog, Homely Planet, at tharp42. livejournal.com. He loathes mayonnaise and any of its sister sauces. Publication Date: September 27, 2011 Print Edition: 8.5” x 5.5” perfect bound trade paperback Page Count: 290 ISBN: 978-988-15161-1-4 Price: US$16.95 E-Book Formats: ePub, mobi (Kindle), PDF Word Count: 90,000 eISBN: 978-988-15161-5-2 Price: US$7.99
“Tharp is like some punk-rock Huck Finn, as aware and humane as he is blithely non-PC, drama springing up around him with every choice he makes: another country, another drink, another thought he maybe should have kept to himself—but his brain is bigger than his mouth, and Dispatches from the Peninsula gives us the whole show. And somehow, amid all its intelligence and humor, the book packs a deeper wallop too, as a serious meditation on the lifelong experiment of growing up.” Lawrence Krauser Author of Lemon, The Joy of Google, and The Day in Question
Thousands of young adults pass through South Korea each year, teaching English in private schools that together make up one of the country’s largest industries. Korea, long isolated by culture and geography, with a complex language and set of social mores, can be a difficult place to call home. Chris Tharp has begun to make a name for himself as a travel writer, and in this gruff but affectionate memoir, explains why Korea can be both hard to like and hard to leave. He navigates his way through the timeless alleys and neon streets of Korea’s cities, painting a picture of a society that is at once ancient and utterly modern; he serves in the trenches of the English teaching industry, working his way from the private, for-profit academy to the university; he treks through the peninsula’s mountain valleys and rides deep into the country’s rural soul on the back of his motorcycle; he also explores the internal geography of Korea, from nearly being deported over a comedy performance, getting caught in the middle of a street riot, to staring face-to-face with North Korean soldiers along the DMZ. During this six-year journey, Tharp must also deal with the death of his parents, which forces him to ask the question: Is home a place that we’re from, or is it something we take with us wherever we go?
“Tough and true is Tharp’s journey in South Korea. I found myself back there, welcoming anew Korea’s wonder, her wrangle, the distinct spirit of the peninsula and her people. All along the way, Tharp is an observant and steady companion.” Cullen Thomas Author of Brother One Cell
© Typhoon Media Limited 2011
The Gunners of Shenyang by Yu Jihui
Publication date: May 14, 2013 Print edition: 8.5" x 5.5" perfect bound trade paperback Page count: 260 ISBN: 978-988-15540-2-4 Price (paper): US$16.95 E-book formats: ePub, Kindle, PDF Word count: 73,000 eISBN: 978-988-15540-6-2 Price (e-book): US$8.99 “Yu Jihui has survived famine and political oppression to tell the remarkable tale of how obsession with food caused by famine coincided with the political obsessions of Communism in Mao's China. Bitter, sad, but at times earthily amusing, this tale reveals how China's Great Famine scarred the generation that endured it. What Wild Swans and Life and Death in Shanghai did for the Cultural Revolution, The Gunners of Shenyang now does for the Great Leap Forward. Nigel Collett Author of Firelight of a Different Colour: The Life and Times of Leslie Cheung and The Butcher of Amritsar
In Yu Jihui’s memoir of his life as a university student in China as the nation starved during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, carrots are decadent luxuries and flatulence is the people’s true common language. “Soapy,” the author’s nickname during his college days, has been dubious about the benefits of the socialist revolution sweeping the country ever since his father was exiled to a desolate town in the middle of nowhere for daring to question the wisdom of trying to industrialize overnight. As a young adult, Soapy and his dorm-mates attend classes, chase girls, and attend endless political meetings, always struggling with the need to maintain a cheerfully patriotic outlook despite that pesky urge to faint from hunger from time to time. When Big Zhang, an older boy from the provinces, dares to be a nonconformist, openly mocking the system, the dangerous silliness of the day turns to literal, life-or-death danger. The Gunners of Shenyang is at once hilarious, revealing, informative, thought-provoking, and sometimes college-boy vulgar — a memoir of the horrors of the times from a boy still young enough to enjoy himself and a man now wise enough to see the big picture for what it was. “This dark comedy of Chinese university life in the famished 1960s, based on real events, is like Wild Swans meeting Three Idiots: a book that probably shouldn’t be funny but is. Highly recommended for anyone interested in a ground-level view of those bizarre days.” Nury Vittachi Author of The Curious Diary of Mr Jam
© Typhoon Media Limited 2013