Category Archives: fiction

BOOKS: “Rise of the Monkey King” ed. / trans. Jeff Pepper & Xiao Hui Wang

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The Rise of the Monkey King: A Story in Simplified Chinese and Pinyin, 600 Word Vocabulary Level (Chinese Edition)The Rise of the Monkey King: A Story in Simplified Chinese and Pinyin, 600 Word Vocabulary Level by Jeff Pepper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Imagin8

This is an abridged and linguistically simplified telling of the first two chapters of Journey to the West. It contains the birth story of Sun Wukong (i.e. the Monkey King) and describes his studies with a sage in an attempt to become immortal.

As someone learning Chinese but at a point where I can only read grammatically and lexically simple content, it’s not easy to find reading material that is both fun to read and readable. The discovery of this series was a godsend. It’s hard to get more thrilling than the story of the Monkey King, and it helps that I’ve already read translations – and so have a bit of context to piece together challenging sentences and to avoid the misunderstandings that can arise when reading a new language. It’s much easier to be a disciplined reader when reading something that is neither a children’s book nor the life story of a preternaturally typical person [which is the usual adult equivalent of a beginner level reader.]

I was pleased by how this book was laid out. Often reading material for learners puts the Chinese characters (hanzi,) the Romanized phonetics (pinyin,) and the English translation all in adjacent rows. While this has its advantages, it also makes it too easy to cheat by eye saccade and not be reading as well as one thinks one is. This book does have all three elements, but it alternates paragraphs of hanzi and pinyin but then puts the translation in an unbroken format after the Mandarin. The book also has a glossary of the book’s vocabulary.

Whether you’ve already read Journey to the West or not, if you’re just learning to read Simplified Chinese, I’d highly recommend this book.

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BOOK: “The Life of an Amorous Man” by Ihara Saikaku [Trans. by Chris Drake]

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The Life of an Amorous Man: A Novel of Love and Desire in Old JapanThe Life of an Amorous Man: A Novel of Love and Desire in Old Japan by Ihara Saikaku
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Tuttle

On sale October 14, 2025

Original Title: 好色一代男

As the title suggests, this novel is presented as the biography of a man who is — shall we say — a horndog. Actually, it would be more correct to say that it is the story of the man’s sex life, as it begins with his sexual awakening as a boy of seven and tells stories of his relationships and dalliances throughout his life until he reaches the age of sixty and is no longer physically capable of the act. Of course, the novel does describe non-amorous life events such as the protagonist’s (i.e. Yonosuke’s) brief time as a monk and as (what in modern terms would be called) a “trust-fund kid.” Yonosuke is from a wealthy merchant family, though his inability to keep his mind on task sees him disowned for many years. So, he leads lives both rich and poor, but never without lust in his heart.

Given that the book focuses on Yonosuke’s interactions with geisha and varied sex workers, one might expect that it is a work of erotica (or even pornography.) It is neither. There is no graphic description of sexual activities and often those events are glossed over altogether. This book will be of much more interest to those interested in what life in Edo Period Japan was like, and particularly how sex work operated as a regulated industry with licit and illicit domains, than to anyone wishing to read erotica for sensual or prurient purposes.

The book has a series of illustrations (one per chapter) that were drawn by the author and appeared in the original (1682) edition. There are also poems (tanka and haiku) sprinkled in here and there, many of which were invocative in their own right.

If you are interested in historical Japan and / or its “floating world,” you’ll find this book to be an interesting read. It’s highly readable and entertaining.

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BOOK: “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain

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The Adventures of Tom SawyerThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Available Online – Project Gutenberg

This is Twain’s best-known and probably most beloved work — though arguably neither his best nor most impactful piece. It tells the tale of a mischievous but warmhearted boy, Tom Sawyer, and a series of formative events in Sawyer’s youth from learning how to trick other kids into doing his chores to being trapped deep in a cave with his sweetheart. While there is a plot throughline involving the closest thing the novel has to a villain, Injun Joe, for the most part the story is episodic. That’s for the best because if too much weight were placed on that throughline, it’s resolution would feel flat. As it is, we see Sawyer and his friends, particularly Huck Finn, subjected to trials and challenges (often of their own making) that present moral dilemmas and the need to steel themselves for the occasion.

It’s often been said that this book isn’t as powerful or influential as its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which this book sets up nicely I should point out. It is probably true that Huck Finn is more profound. That said, Tom Sawyer could be said to be a cleaner read in that Huck Finn gets a bit muddled, particularly toward its end.

I’d highly recommend this book for all readers.

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BOOK REVIEW: “New Story of the Stone” by Jianren Wu [Trans. by Liz Evans Weber]

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New Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction NovelNew Story of the Stone: An Early Chinese Science Fiction Novel by Jianren Wu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Columbia University Press

This book is presented as a sequel to the Chinese literary classic (alternatively) known as Dream of the Red Chamber or Story of the Stone. The central character is a scholarly traveler by the name of Baoyu. The first part of the book is set in China around the time of the Boxer Rebellion, an event that features in the story. Throughout this portion, the book reads like historical fiction. However, Baoyu’s travels eventually bring him to a hidden realm, a technologically advanced utopia within China. It is here where Baoyu’s adventures get fantastical and otherworldly, and the book ventures into the domain of Science Fiction.

The setting of the book reminds me a little of Marvel’s Wakanda from Black Panther. Perhaps both instances of worldbuilding were motivated by the humiliated colonists’ fantasy of being more advanced than those who pull the strings for once, or of showing their (respective) lands to be places of “crouching tigers and hidden dragons” (i.e. where great talents exist but remain unseen.) (Note: While China wasn’t on-the-whole colonized by a Western country, its interaction with England and other Western nations left it forced to accept terms unfavorable and undesirable to China (not to mention the outright colonized enclaves such as Hong Kong and Macau.) While the publisher has emphasized the science fiction aspect of this work, it is an anticolonial work through and through. The book can come across as xenophobic and nationalistic in places, but this only reminds the reader of how such positions might be arrived at under the boot of foreign influence.

The book is readable though philosophical and is well worth reading for those interested in developing a deeper insight into Chinese perspectives.

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BOOKS: “HK24” by The Hong Kong Writers Circle

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HK24: Twenty-Four Hours of Hong Kong Stories (Hong Kong Writers Circle Anthology Book 13)HK24: Twenty-Four Hours of Hong Kong Stories by Stewart McKay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Hong Kong Writers Circle

This collection of twenty short stories is connected by the theme of events taking place in a single day in Hong Kong. Besides this commonality of setting, there is no other connective tissue between the stories. Tonally, the pieces range from hilarious to tragic. There are suspenseful genre fiction stories as well as realist literary fiction (i.e. telling the story of work-a-day characters engaged in events of everyday life.)

I found “Mummy, Daddy, Angry Birds” by Carsten John and “Rent” by Sharon Tang to be the best humor pieces, and “Egrets” (Paul Clinton Corrigan,) “Help Yourself” (Edmund Price,) and “Joss” (Dimple Shah) to be the most thrilling and intriguing dramatic pieces. All the stories were well-crafted, but some did stand out more than others. A few of those realist pieces that explored “mundane” expat life in Hong Kong made for engaging and distinctive reading. And Hong Kong is uniquely situated for tales of an urban shaman or a Triad shooting.

This is the thirteenth volume of a series put out by the Hong Kong Writers Circle. Each volume has a different theme (besides being Hong Kong connected.) Hong Kong is one of those places that is authentically itself, not to be confused with anywhere else, and that offers a great opportunity to build fascinating tales that could only take place there. [I found it interesting that “should I stay or should I go” was a repeated theme across multiple stories.]

I picked this book up as a piece of travel literature for an upcoming visit to Hong Kong (I make sure to read a work of literature from every country I visit — provided I can find anything translated.) I’d highly recommend this book for readers interested in short fiction with that distinctive Hong Kong flavor. I intend to look into other volumes in the series, myself.

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BOOK: “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982” by Cho Nam-Joo

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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Simon & Schuster / Scribner

This fictitious biography explores the tribulations of being a woman in modern-day South Korea. It tells the tale of the titular lead from birth through a middle-aged motherhood. It discusses issues ranging from disappointment at having girl children to feelings of anxiety in a world laden with horny boys to the subtle sexism of the modern workplace.


The book blurb calls this book “riveting, original, and uncompromising.” I’ll give it “uncompromising,” and I have insufficient experience with the book’s “peers” to challenge the “original” claim, but I do have to call BS on the “riveting” bit. In fairness, the point of the book seems to be to offer a brutally typical life experience — not the novel-shaped extremes of a rollercoaster existence. The fact that the book is not riveting doesn’t make it unimportant or unworthy of reading. However, this is not the book one should pick up expecting to read on the edge of one’s seat. It’s well-crafted literary fiction with an important message, but “compelling” is not an appropriate descriptor. The book suffers from a progressive increase in drag as one reads onward.

Still, I’d recommend it for readers of literary fiction interested in varied cultural experiences. It’s a quick read with fine character development.

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PROMPT: Book from Childhood

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Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?

Green Eggs and Ham is the earliest children’s book that made an impression — mostly for its catchy lyricism. Robinson Crusoe was the first story that resonated.

BOOKS: “A Horse’s Tale” by Mark Twain

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A Horse's TaleA Horse’s Tale by Mark Twain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Project Gutenberg Page

Among the lesser-known works of Twain, A Horse’s Tale mixes an epistolary by a military officer at a remote outpost with dialogues between animals of the post (principally the protagonist, a horse called Soldier Boy.) The principal subject of the epistolary is a precocious girl who lives at the outpost and who is adored by all as the one soft, sweet creature in a world of warfighting men and their animals. The conversations between animals offer the most amusing portion of this book, largely for the fun being poked at humanity’s expense.

In its best moments, this novella is intensely touching or hilarious. However, it does suffer from inconsistency of pacing and tone.

If you enjoy Mark Twain’s humor and storytelling, this novella is well worth reading. If you’re primarily a reader of present-day genre / commercial fiction, it probably won’t be your thing.

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BOOKS: “A Short Stay in Hell” by Steven L. Peck

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A Short Stay in HellA Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site: Strange Violin Editions

If you enjoy books like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 or Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this book will probably be right up your alley. It may not be as unrelentingly (and hilariously) absurd as H2G2, but it’s clever, amusing, and thought-provoking.

The premise is that a devout Christian finds himself in hell because it turns out that Zoroastrianism was actually the one true religion. Fortunately, Zoroastrian hell is neither as grim nor (perhaps, ironically) as fire & brimstone-oriented as the Biblical version, but it is tedious, demoralizing, and — while it might not last forever –it lasts long enough to seem like forever.

Jorge Luis Borges fans (such as myself) will find a nod to his work in the shape of said hell.

I’d highly recommend this book for readers of irreverent and humorous literary fiction. It’s funny. It’s clever. And it’s a quick read.

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BOOKS: “Sightseeing” by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

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SightseeingSightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher Site – Atlantic

This collection of seven short stories offers insight into Thailand and its culture, but the stories are also gripping and clever. It’s a rare thing for stories to so engage with issues such as poverty, class, the refugee experience, the human experience, and foreignness and to still be highly entertaining.

Farangs is about the interaction of Thais and foreigners in the form of a love triangle featuring a Thai protagonist, a Western girl, and the girl’s erstwhile (also foreign) boyfriend.

At the Cafe Lovely is about two brothers, the older of whom takes the younger brother to a “cafe” that is more of a bar with built-in brothel. The story shows the seedy side of Bangkok, but also the bond between brothers.

Draft Day is about two friends, one from a wealthy family and the other not, who have to go to the draft lottery to determine whether they will have to serve in the military or not. This story is potent observation on social justice.

Sightseeing is about a mother and son’s last trip before the mother loses her vision.

Priscilla and the Cambodians is about a Cambodian girl who, in a rough-and-tumble manner, befriends two geeky Thai boys. The story explores the woes of being poor outsiders in a world that cares neither for the poor, nor for outsiders.

Don’t Let Me Die in this Place is about an old American man who moves in with his son and the son’s Thai wife and their children in Bangkok after the man has suffered a stroke and is in recovery. It’s about the old man’s struggle to adapt to a very different life while at the same time coping with not being able to take care of himself.

Cockfighter is the longest and also probably the most visceral of the stories. It centers on a teenaged girl whose father is the titular “Cockfighter” and whose mother makes hand-sewn bras. It’s an intensely psychological work of fiction with some hilarious moments, as well.

I’d highly recommend this collection for all readers of short fiction. I chose it as my travel literature for Thailand (I read a work [or works] of literature from all countries I visit,) but I don’t think one has to have a particular interest in Thailand to find the stories fascinating and profound.

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