One of the goodest bad guys in the annals of fiction would have to be Nguyen Ngoc Minh, the protagonist of author Stephen Leather’s The Chinaman (1992, ISBN 978-0340-58025-7). And right, he’s not Chinese, but rather a former Vietnamese military man that ended up in England, running a Chinese food take-out business. Life was good […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Literature' Category
WoWasis book review: ‘The Tunnel Rats,’ Vietnam terror by Stephen Leather
Vietnam’s Cu Chi tunnels were a particularly nasty element in the Vietnam war. Built by the Viet Cong, they went for miles underground, and there were nasty things living in there, aside from Viet Cong soldiers, including rats, massive spiders, and stinging mites that lived in the tree roots. Novelist Stephen Leather has managed to […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Stephen Leather’s ‘Live Fire’
If you’re a Brit and love adventure fiction, you’ve probably read Stephen Leather. If you’re a Yank, you probably haven’t. Fact is, Leather sells tons of books in the UK. He’s written more than thirty novels, sold nearly three million books in all, and did get some U.S. traction with his eBook The Basement, which […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis introduces author Harold Stephens’ people of Southeast Asia
Harold Stephens knows Southeast Asia about as well as any author we’ve read. He knows it by sea as well as by land, and has written two books based on the fascinating people he’s met in Asia over the years, At Home in Asia: Expatriates in Southeast Asia and Their Stories, and The Strange Disappearance […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Harold Stephens’ ‘The Voyages of the Schooner Third Sea’
Ever thought about cashing it all in, grabbing a sailboat, and traveling in the South Seas? Writer Harold Stephens did just that, and chronicles the romance and challenges of doing so in his thrilling book The Voyages of the Schooner Third Sea (2012, ISBN 978-0-9786951-5-6). Here at WoWasis, we’ve become real fans of the travel […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘The Strange Disappearance of Jim Thompson’ by Harold Stephens
Don’t let the title of the book fool you. There’s more here than just a story of the demise of the legendary silk king. Harold Stephens’ The Strange Disappearance of Jim Thompson and Stories of Other Expats in Southeast Asia (2003, ISBN 0-9642521-7-1), which originally was published in 1978 under the title Asian Portraits, is […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson’ by Joshua Kurlantzick
Here at WoWasis, we believe that there are at least two schools of thought on how best to live the expatriate experience in Asia. One we call “ping-ponging,” bouncing back and forth between one’s mother country and Asia. Regarding Thailand, one advocate who lives part-time in the U.S. states, “I go to Thailand, and after […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘The Dwarf,’ a Korean novel by Cho Se-hui
Originally written in 1978, Korean writer Cho Se-hui’s novel The Dwarf (2006, ISBN-10 0-8248-3101-2) isn’t an east grasp for westerners. The story represents characters in black and white, and the tale, of workers vs. management, is didactic. Two things helped us here at WoWasis through this otherwise well-crafted novel, translator Bruce Fulton’s afterword, and the […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Brother One Cell,’ Korean prisons by Cullen Thomas
Cullen Thomas’ Brother One Cell makes for compelling reading on both Korea and prison life
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction’
If you’re going to delve into the genre of Korean fiction, the Expanded Edition of the compilation Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction (2007, ISBN 978-0-7656-1810-8), translated and edited by Marshall R. Pihl and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, is a pretty good place to start. There are sixteen short stories in this book of 336 […]
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