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This is more than just a self-indulgent story about an imagined joy ride the author takes across Taiwan with his recently departed friend Mike and dead dog Guo-Guo. It brings into sharp focus both the author’s “Taiwan curiousness” and his love of travel. The result is a wide-ranging story that spans space and time to capture the fullness of Taiwan in its vivid colors, historical experiences, and social mores. Backed by extensive documentary and site research, Kurt Lu transforms a story about a flight-of-fancy road trip into a deep-dive exploration into Taiwan’s varied topographies and ecologies as well as luminaries past and present. In bringing closure for himself, the author hopes to help lighten the multigenerational unease of his nation.

While bringing zir trademark narrative virtuosity, practiced sci-fi acumen, and multifaceted gender perspective to The Primordial Voice Singing to Outer Gods in Super-Galaxies, Lucifer Huang adds new elements of chivalric wuxia and Taoist mythology that, once readers acclimate to the quirky authorial style, invigorate the uniquely textured literary landscapes that populate each and every chapter. Deceptively chaotic, the narrative is tied together by the “information game”, which subtly yet effectively reflects upon and challenges the information flows that saturate and define today’s worldwide internet. This work is as expansively brilliant as it is desolately lonely.

The 1915 Tapani Incident, Taiwan’s largest anti-colonial uprising, is the literary scaffolding used in Tainan Requiem to ask the question: If gods truly existed and influenced human affairs, how might they have shaped the face of Taiwanese resistance to Japanese colonial rule? The story follows actual historical figure Û Tshing-Hong’s transformation from small-town intellectual to temple spirit medium, and spins a creative tale about how Û and anti-Japanese guerrilla leader Kang Tīng together inspired and then lost this popular insurrection against their island’s colonial rulers. Tainan Requiem breathes vivid new life into a footnote in history, and examines a people’s determination, and ultimate failure, to change their destiny.

Founded in 1926, the leftist “Black Youth Alliance” is a rare example of an anarchist organization operating in colonial-era Taiwan. While its influence on the island’s politics would be long-lasting, the alliance itself dissolved after a brief few months. What was the appeal of anarchic ideas to contemporary intellectuals, artists and social activists? What did this alliance actually accomplish? The story unfolds around several main characters, a Taiwan-born Japanese idealist and his Taiwanese student peers, offering a lens into the cultural zeitgeist and ideas circulating among contemporary young, educated circles. The author’s easy-flowing narrative approach handily takes on a serious topic couched within the colors and textures of colonial Taiwan in the mid-early twentieth century.

Teruo the Orangutan centers around protagonist Masao’s intriguing notion that an orangutan recently delivered to the Taihoku Zoo from the jungles of Southeast Asia might somehow be Teruo, his brother who had just recently died in battle in the Dutch Indies. It “writes” him messages and even eerily resembles his dead brother. Framed around taxidermy, the story opens windows into indigenous craftsmanship, specimen-making, and Taipei’s old Taihoku Zoo and examines, in the character of Teruo, how, why and where Taiwanese served in Japan’s military during the Pacific War. The historical details woven into this work of fantasy infuse a rich and satisfying sense of realism that make this novel not only a universal tale of family affection but also a mirror into a unique time in recent Taiwan history.

Though Taiwan is a land of mountains, lakes, and rivers, for various historical and political reasons, most people in Taiwan live out of contact with nature, with little to no knowledge of the public institutions that guard the wilderness. This provides an opportunity to those who would plunder the island’s natural resources. The author of this book addresses this problem by describing the work of Taiwan’s mountain rangers, from environmental surveys, forest fire-fighting, and rescues, to combatting the illegal exploitation of public lands, all while faced with shortages of resources and manpower. While The Radical Ranger doesn’t romanticize this work, it nonetheless extolls a romantic embrace of the mountains themselves, a dedication to the profession, and the commitment to providing readers with an accurate picture of these mountain protectors.