Another Kind of Paradise: Short Stories from the New Asia-Pacific

by Trevor Carolan (Editor)

Overview

The stories in Another Kind of Paradise offer a lens into the contending passions, beauties, and contradictions of contemporary daily live throughout the East and Southeast Asian region - now more commonly known as the Asia-Pacific. Another Kind of Paradise provides and illuminating introduction to the unexpected literary marvels of this crucible region. As political and economic events in China, Burma, Korea, Bali, Thailand, and Japan insistently remind us, the Asia-Pacific is a world in which many dramas affecting the world are played out on a daily basis. And as East and Southeast Asia's traditional Confucian, Buddhist, and Islamic cultures continue to engage with the unstoppable challenges of globalization, ideas and events that were unthinkable a decade ago - individual yearnings of every caliber - are now at the heart of its literary agenda. As front-line witnesses, writers from the Asia-Pacific document these social, political, and economic changes through their stories. The results are compelling, fascinating reading - from generational portraits of an emerging "slacker" youth culture to tales representing progressive views of marriage, divorce, emigrations, feminism, and gay issues. Yet Asia's old ghosts linger too, and clashes between urban and rural values and memories of painful history are never far off - all shadowed by the relentless advance of imported consumer culture from the West.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013826236
Publisher:	Cheng & Tsui Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/09/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	298
File size:	391 KB

About the Author

For 25 years, Trevor Carolan has published extensively on literature, ethics, and wisdom traditions from the Asia-Pacific region. His 1992 anthology The Colors of Heaven: Short Stories from the Pacific Rim was hailed as an enormously impressive and important text for its path-breaking depictions of everyday Asian life. He holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D from Bond University, Queensland, and teaches English at the University of the Fraser Valley near Vancouver. His work has appeared in five languages.

Editorial Reviews

Trevor Carolan's Another Kind of Paradise is a wonderful rich collection of some of the best contemporary fiction from East and Southeast Asia. These stories give students a direct window onto the wildly diverse cultural assumptions and influences at play in Asian societies today. Another Kind of Paradise is the perfect supplement to any course on modern Asia, or on contemporary Asian, world, or comparative literature.-Dr. Paul Ropp, Klein Professor of History and Asian Studies, Clark University

Paul Ropp

These stories present the intersection of rapidly shifting layers of tradition and modernity...amidst a rapidly globalizing landscape that is erupting and taking shape in each of the countries represented...What is most exciting...[is that] these stories are told from a perspective that privileges the characters who inhabit the worlds of the stories themselves, characters who have been traditionally marginalized and erased in the Western view of Asia or the Pacific as a 'paradise'.

Micheline Soong