Irreverent, informed and downright eclectic crime fiction and reportage from Southeast Asia and beyond
Everyone has a good book in them so they say, Asia’s first English-language crime publishing house looks set to put that adage to the test. Mark Bibby Jackson interviews me about all things Crime Wave Press in this month’s ASIA LIFE Magazine, both in the Thailand and Cambodia edition. I get to talk about crime [...]
My review of Chris Taylor´s excellent novel Harvest Season is running in The Wall Street Journal this week. A thoughtful meditation on backpacker mayhem in Southern China, quite unlike Alex Garland´s The Beach. Read the full review here.
The end of the backpacker generation? Lonely Planet finally orbited into irrelevance? China overrun by western hippies? And is Chris Taylor´s new novel Harvest Season a worthy follow-up to Alex Garland´s The Beach? Find out on Tuesday, May 24th, when I will be grilling author Chris Taylor on his recently published novel, at The Space [...]
Tom Vater talks pop music in Asia with Sean Hocking, owner of Metal Postcard, Hong Kong´s most prolific alternative record label. In 2010, Metal Postcard released the debut single of Phnom Penh`s The Cambodian Space Project. This year, Hocking will unleash a 7″ vinyl single of Pussy & The Learjets, Bangkok’s loudest RocknRoll band, on [...]
Every day, we appear to be moving a little closer to a state of affairs where governments could become obsolete. Large parts of the world have always been ruled by people who don’t really qualify as governments, but in recent years, perfectly respectable rulers have also shown signs (not for the first time) that they [...]
About two weeks ago, I reported on the satirical website ChinaReallySucks.Com, which until then had evaded the Chinese censors. The website takes pot-shots at Chinese linguistic inadequacies and features hundreds of photographs of inordinately undemocratic public signs, bizarre slogans on T-Shirts, as well as images of corporate rip-offs such as Star Fucks, Pizza Huh and [...]
Before I get accused of anti-Americanism, I´d like to take the opportunity to inform readers of a very naughty site on China, www.chinareallysucks.com. You´re not going to find any objective analysis here, the makers of this site clearly don´t like China much. Amazingly though, it is claimed, the site is produced, researched, ridiculed and uploaded [...]