Asian Short Stories

You may have found the best teacher in town or the most incredible learning app around, but if you don’t put all of that knowledge to practice, you’ll soon forget everything you’ve obtained. This is why being engaged with interesting learning material can be so essential for somebody wishing to learn a new language. Therefore, in this book we have compiled 20 easy-to-follow, compelling, and fun stories that will allow you to expand your vocabulary and give you the tools to improve your grasp of the wonderful Japanese language.

Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners has been written especially for students from low-intermediate to intermediate level, designed to give a sense of achievement, a feeling of progress and most importantly - enjoyment! Mapped to B1-B2 on the Common European Framework of Reference, these eight captivating stories are designed to give you a sense of achievement and a feeling of progress when listening.

Looking to step up your Japanese before that big trip next year? Are you getting prepared for an interview with a recruiter in Tokyo? Maybe you’re tired of reading the subtitles on the latest anime! No language is easy to learn without practicing - even if you know all of the rules and have watched the videos - you’ll still have trouble. Diving into interesting material (such as stories) can be the difference between mastering a language and never leaving the basic level.

Tagalog, also known as Filipino, isn’t an easy language to learn. Mostly due to the absolute lack of reading material out there, you can find it quite tough to learn this language spoken by around 24 million people in the Philippines and around the world. But we’re about to change that with Tagalog Short Stories for Beginners! By providing you with 20 easy-to-understand, compelling, and fun stories that will give you the tools that you require to learn the language, get ready to expand your vocabulary and improve your grasp of the wonderful Filipino tongue.

Stories of Your Life and Others presents characters who must confront sudden change-the inevitable rise of automatons or the appearance of aliens-while striving to maintain some sense of normalcy. In the amazing and much-lauded title story (the basis for the 2016 movie Arrival), a grieving mother copes with divorce and the death of her daughter by drawing on her knowledge of alien languages and non-linear memory recollection.

A young man painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he'll never afford. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. In her stunning Giller Prize-winning debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to make their own.

Improve your Chinese skills and grow your vocabulary with these 10 entertaining Chinese short stories!

Living forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred. From Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in this collection haunt and are haunted.

From the award-winning author of Chemistry comes a sharp and poignant short story that follows a young medical student working in clinical research and grappling with the realities of a future in her chosen field.

We’re constantly trying to improve and master new skills, and the Japanese language is no exception. A skill that can help open important doors in business and tourism, knowing Japanese will lead you towards a huge number of opportunities in life that will be worth every second dedicated to your studies.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces—death, violence, estrangement—come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details.

From one of China’s most famous contemporary writers, here is a stunning collection of stories, selected from the best of Yu Hua’s early work, that shows his far-reaching influence on a pivotal period in Chinese literature. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yu Hua and other young Chinese writers began to reimagine their national literature. Departing from conventional realism in favor of a more surreal and subjective approach inspired by Kafka, Faulkner, and Borges, the boundary-pushing fiction of this period reflected the cultural changes sweeping the world’s most populous nation.

In a quiet suburb of New Delhi, two next-door neighbors develop a friendship: one, a young woman engaged to be married, and the other, Nadine: a woman in her 60s living with her second husband. We follow these two women through their phone calls and visits together, diving deeper into Nadine's storied past: With her larger-than-life personality and proclivity to defy society's conventions, her insight weighs heavily on her young friend, about to face a major turning point of her own.

In the 19th century, the world was Europeanized. In the 20th century, it was Americanized. Now, in the 21st century, the world is being Asianized. The “Asian Century” is even bigger than you think. Far greater than just China, the new Asian system taking shape is a multicivilizational order spanning Saudi Arabia to Japan, Russia to Australia, Turkey to Indonesia - linking five billion people through trade, finance, infrastructure, and diplomatic networks that together represent 40 percent of global GDP.

Set on five continents and spanning nearly a century, We Two Alone traces the long arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple gets caught in the outbreak of violence in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The consul general of China attempts to save lives following Kristallnacht in Vienna. A family aspires to buy a home in South Africa during the rise of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive.

Meng Jin’s critically acclaimed debut novel, Little Gods, was praised as “spectacular and emotionally polyphonic (Omar El-Akkad, BookPage), “powerful” (Washington Post), and “meticulously observed, daringly imagined” (Claire Messud). Now Jin turns her considerable talents to short fiction, in ten thematically linked stories.

Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present. Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited.

In these 11 stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien - and through it, find a way to liberation. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most fearlessly inventive young writers.

An incident at a TSA security check point sows chaos and rumors, creating a chain of events that impacts twelve young Asian Americans in a crowded and restless airport. As their disrupted journeys crisscross and collide, they encounter fellow travelers—some helpful, some hostile—as they discover the challenges of friendship, the power of courage, the importance of the right word at the right time, and the unexpected significance of a blue Stratocaster electric guitar.

Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world, and its American diaspora, all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home. Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Injam’s stories question what it means to have a home, to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as a people ready to accept you as you are.