New Books In Literature

Today I talked with Kawika Guillermo, a creative scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. His book Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel (Westphalia Press, 2018) describes Skyler Faralan’s travels to Southeast Asia with $500 and a death wish. After months of wandering, he crosses paths with other dejected travelers: a short-fused NGO worker called Sophea; Arthur, a brazen expat abandoned by his wife and son; and Winston, an intellectual exile. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one Asian city to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place. Stamped will appeal to progressive-minded readers of literary fiction and travel writing, especially those with an interest in Asia or the Asian American experience.  Melody Yunzi Li is an Assistant Professor at University of Houston. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis,