"Guy Delisle is a wry 37-year-old French Canadian cartoonist whose work for a French animation studio requires him to oversee production at various Pacific Rim studios on the grim frontiers of free trade. His employer puts him up for months at a time in 'cold and soulless' hotel rooms where he suffers the usual maladies of the long-term boarder: cultural and linguistic alienation, boredom, and cravings for Western food and real coffee. Delisle depicts these sojourns into the heart of isolation in [the] brilliant graphic novel . . . Pyongyang."—Foreign Affairs

"Ghosh's best and most ambitious work yet is an adventure story set in nineteenth-century Calcutta against the backdrop of the Opium Wars. On the Ibis, a ship engaged in transporting opium across the Bay of Bengal, varied life stories converge. A fallen raja, a half-Chinese convict, a plucky American sailor, a widowed opium farmer, a transgendered religious visionary are all united by the 'smoky paradise' of the opium seed. Ghosh writes with impeccable control, and with a vivid and sometimes surprising imagination: a woman's tooth protrudes 'like a tilted gravestone'; an opium addict's writhing spasms are akin to 'looking at a pack of rats squirming in a sack'; the body of a young man is 'a smoking crater that had just risen from the ocean and was still waiting to be explored.'"—The New Yorker

"Gilmour captures the spirit of life in the sharply defined spheres of Queen Victoria's court and the government in London, the viceroy's circle in South Asia, and the district offices where British civil servants met Indian subjects on a daily basis. He skillfully depicts the peculiar mixture of proper manners and gentlemanly practices and the legal and bureaucratic standards of one of the world's great civil services . . . The title of the book succinctly captures his idea that the British colonizers operated as though they were a part of the Indian caste system—thus garnering the mystique of authority without having to rely unduly on force."—Foreign Affairs

"Fans of the absurdity and dark humor of Milan Kundera's portraits of life behind the Iron Curtain will appreciate these same elements in Ma Jian's work."—Alane Salierno Mason, The Baltimore Sun

"As a whole [these stories] create an imaginative and disturbing vision of life at its most oppressive."—Rodney Welch, Freetimes