Better late than never to the year-end best-of lists! H.V. Chao makes Bradley Winterton’s year-end roundup in The Taipei Times of notable literary titles: novels, nonfiction, and stories alike.
Finally, Thunkbook 1 surfaced this year, as the incarnation of the former Taiwan-based English-language literary magazine Pressed. In August, I found that the best item it contained was by H.V. Chao.
Winterton’s list looks like a lot of fascinating reading I will have to check out, including Edmund Trelawny Backhouse’s memoirs Decadence Mandchoue, about a homosexual English eccentric and talented linguist who gained access to the Forbidden City and became one of the Empress Dowager’s many lovers; Thai Stick by Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter; and The First Bohemians by art historian Vic Gatrell, on London’s 18th-century satiric cartoonists.
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