Letters from Thailand
Letters from Thailand

Author: Botan

Publisher: Silkworm Books

Published: 2002-02-01

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 162840230X

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When the original Thai version of Letters from Thailand appeared in Bangkok in 1969, it was promptly awarded the SEATO Prize for Thai Literature. Thirteen years later, it was translated into English to reach a much wider readership. Today, the book is still considered one of Thailand’s most entertaining and enduring modern novels, and one of the few portrayals of the immigrant Chinese experience in urban Thailand. Letters from Thailand is the story of Tan Suang U, a young man who leaves China to make his fortune in Thailand at the close of World War II, and ends up marrying, raising a family, and operating a successful business. The novel unfolds through his letters to his beloved mother in China. In Tan Suang U’s lively account of his daily life in Bangkok’s bustling Chiantown, larger and deeper themes emerge: his determination to succeed at business in this strange new culture; his hopes for his family; his resentment at how easily his children embrace urban Thai culture at the expense of the Chinese heritage which he holds dear; his inability to understand or adopt Thai ways; and his growing alienation from a society that is changing too fast for him.

Behind the Painting
Behind the Painting

Author: Siburapha

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2024-10-10

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 1802065725

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One of Thailand’s best-known and most highly regarded novels, portraying the romance of a young Thai man and a married older woman ‘In that tranquil and apparently very ordinary picture, I see everything unfolding. Every scene, every part, from the beginning to the final act’ Nopporn, a Thai student studying in Japan, is tasked with hosting a distinguished old family friend and his new wife, the beautiful, aristocratic Kirati. Despite their difference in age and status, and the social constraints of the day, Nopporn and Kirati are inexorably drawn to each other, and love starts to bloom. A stirring portrayal of youthful romantic obsession, and later attempts to come to terms with the frailty of passionate feelings, Behind the Painting also shows the constrained lives of many women of the time. First published in 1937, it is one of Thailand’s best-known and most beloved novels. Translated by David Smyth

Thailand Confidential
Thailand Confidential

Author: Jerry Hopkins

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2011-05-03

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1462900240

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"Wanna stand in the face of a charging elephant, get hit by a motorcycle, eat giant water bugs, blowtorch your mouth on some of the hottest chili peppers on earth, then go watch a sex change operation? Of course you don't, but, happily, Jerry Hopkins has done all that and more--lots more--in this darkly humorous, deeply affectionate, clear-eyed but never patronizing portrait of Thailand, his adopted home. Highly recommended." --Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard, Hold the Enlightenment and Jaguars Ripped My Flesh "After over a decade in the country, Hopkins knows and loves his subject dearly--that much is obvious--and his vivid portrait projects that love from every page." --Jann Wenner, editor and founder of Rolling Stone Magazine "A loving expose of everything that's wonderful about Thailand, and much that isn't. Should be required reading for all newcomers." --Joe Cummings, author of the Lonely Planet Thailand Guide Writer Jerry Hopkins came to Thailand for a visit in the 1980s, and ended up a permanent resident with a temporary visa--a big, white farang haunting the bars and back alleys of Bangkok. His essays explore the mystery and mayhem of "The Land of Smiles" to hilarious--and sometimes disturbing--effect. Travel with him to a place where whisky is rum, water buffaloes are gay, insects are dinner, dildos are lucky charms, and your wildest adolescent fantasies can come true (for a nominal fee).

Bangkok Wakes to Rain
Bangkok Wakes to Rain

Author: Pitchaya Sudbanthad

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0525534768

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"A house in the center of Bangkok becomes the point of confluence where lives are shaped by upheaval, memory, and the lure of home. Witness to two centuries' flux in one of the world's most restless cities, a house plays host to longings and losses past, present, and future. A nineteenth-century missionary doctor pines for the comforts of New England even as he finds the vibrant foreign chaos of Siam increasingly difficult to resist. A post-war society woman marries, mothers, and holds court, little suspecting the course of her future. A jazz pianist is summoned in the 1970s to conjure music that will pacify resident spirits, even as he's haunted by ghosts of his former life. Not long after, a young woman gives swimming lessons in the luxury condos that have eclipsed the old house, trying to outpace the long shadow of her political past. And in the post-submergence Bangkok of the future, a band of savvy teenagers guides tourists and former residents past waterlogged, ruined landmarks, selling them tissues to wipe their tears for places they themselves do not remember. Time collapses as these stories collide and converge, linked by blood, memory, yearning, chance, and the forces voraciously making and remaking the amphibian, ever-morphing city itself"--Provided by publisher.

Burmese Refugees: Letters from the Thai-Burma Border
Burmese Refugees: Letters from the Thai-Burma Border

Author: T. F. Rhoden

Publisher: Digital Lycanthrope

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 113

ISBN-13: 0615471072

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Burmese Refugees: Letters from the Thai-Burma BorderThe misrule of the Burmese military junta continues to be the main catalyst of refugees in Southeast Asia today. In this collection of letters, learn about the true stories of people who have fled from that regime. All of the accounts are written by the refugees themselves and explain how they became asylum seekers, what life is like in the camps, and what they envision for their future. These stories document persons from the 8888 generation, the 2007 Saffron Revolution, and various ethnic struggles. This book contains the narratives of thirty diverse individuals-all of them united by the simple desire to have a more representative government in their homeland.

My Letters to Conceição
My Letters to Conceição

Author: Jorge Molina del Callejo

Publisher: Incorgnito Publishing Press

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9781944589851

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An unusual epistolary novel of lost love, mystic fantasy, and the search for meaning in life, wrapped up in a world-wide travel log of people and places. While on a business trip to Cambodia, a man is given a package of letters by a mysterious elderly woman. All of the letters, none of which have been mailed, are addressed to someone in Mexico City named, Conceição and are return addressed to locations all over the world. What the businessman finds within the letters, is the love story of a man named Vasco, in his early thirties, who has decided to recount the story of his life to his first love Conceição, whom he lost many years earlier. At first, it is evident that Vasco seeks closure, and to rid himself of an emptiness he's felt since Conceição's departure. But, as one letter turns into dozens, the correspondence becomes a journey itself describing not only his desolation, but his life and adventures as well. As Vasco travels the world remorseful over his lost love, he begins to have strange visions of the future along with haunting dreams of a girl named Sok Meta. Continuing his journey, Vasco becomes convinced that Sok Meta is real and that she is his one, true soul mate. Consumed with passion and longing, Vasco seeks out Sok Meta, only to find that he must undertake one last, desperate leap of faith before he can know the meaning he has long sought and be with his one true love, Sok Meta.

A Good True Thai
A Good True Thai

Author: Sunisa Manning

Publisher: Epigram Books

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 981490127X

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In 1970s Thailand, three young people meet each other with fateful results. Det has just lost his mother, the granddaughter of a king. He clings to his best friend Chang, a smart boy from the slums, as they go to college; while there, Det falls for Lek, a Chinese immigrant with radical ideals. Longing for glory, Det journeys into his friends’ political circles, and then into the Thai jungle to fight. During Thailand’s most famous period of political and artistic openness, these three friends must reconcile their deep feelings for one another with the realities of perilous political revolution.

The Letters of the Republic
The Letters of the Republic

Author: Michael Warner

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780674044883

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The subject of Michael Warner's book is the rise of a nation. America, he shows, became a nation by developing a new kind of reading public, where one becomes a citizen by taking one's place as writer or reader. At heart, the United States is a republic of letters, and its birth can be dated from changes in the culture of printing in the early eighteenth century. The new and widespread use of print media transformed the relations between people and power in a way that set in motion the republican structure of government we have inherited. Examining books, pamphlets, and circulars, he merges theory and concrete analysis to provide a multilayered view of American cultural development.

The Ferrante Letters
The Ferrante Letters

Author: Sarah Chihaya

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 023155088X

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Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.