Written by Chee-Hann Wu.
Image credit: Yi-Jen Yu.
Just two weeks before the 2026 Brooklyn Book Festival, we saw the news that Taiwanese writer Ping Lu’s novel To the East of the East, translated into English by Jeremy Tiang, has been named to the longlist for the 2026 National Book Award for Translated Literature, following Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue, which won the same award in 2024. This recognition surely highlights how Taiwan literature continues to reach international readers through translation. We were eager to include the book in our collection but soon realised it won’t be officially published until November 2026.
There has been a long history of translating Taiwan literature into different languages. Chinese Stories from Taiwan: 1960–1970, published in 1976, was one of the first collections of Taiwan literature published in English. Later, Professor Tu Kuo-ch’ing of the University of California, Santa Barbara, started a journal, Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series, in 1996, to systematically translate Taiwan literature into English. In addition to edited volumes and anthologies, The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution by Chen Jo-hsi was first published in English in 1978. In the 1980s and 90s, Pai Hsien-yung’s renowned short story collection Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream: Tales of Taipei Characters (later republished as Taipei People) and his novel Crystal Boys were translated into English.
When selecting titles for this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival collection, oftentimes we noticed how difficult it was to acquire books that were already out of print. For instance, despite searching the internet for Pai’s books, we couldn’t find any reasonably priced and in good condition. We also realised that it was impossible to keep all Taiwan literature, both fiction and nonfiction, available in English under our radar. Therefore, a repository has become extremely helpful. The National Museum of Taiwan Literature opened the Taiwan Literature Translation Center and launched the Taiwan Literature in Translation Repository in 2012 to coordinate the translation and publishing of Taiwan literary works in translation. Two years later, Books from Taiwan, an initiative funded by the Ministry of Culture, was founded to introduce a select list of Taiwan publishing titles to both foreign readers and publishers. We also relied on individuals doing book reviews and social media accounts on Asian, Asian American, or specifically Taiwan literature.
Fiction-wise, Wu Ming-yi’s books, The Man with the Compound Eyes (2013) and The Stolen Bicycle (2015), are among the highlights of our collection. The latter was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2018. Wu is likely one of, if not the most studied and researched Taiwanese novelists in Anglophone academia. Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (2014) and Notes of a Crocodile (2017) are the other highlights. Both were published in English by the renowned New York Review Books and were, for a long time, among the very few titles by a Taiwanese author one could find on bookstore shelves in the United States.
More recently, Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town (2022), Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise (2024), Yang Shuang-zi’s Taiwan Travelogue (2024), and Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets (2025) have joined the shelves, along with many others. As we curated the booth for the Festival, we considered what resonance these titles may have with readers worldwide. For instance, gender and sexuality emerge not as isolated “Taiwan issues,” but as questions that travel easily across borders: how queer people negotiate family expectations and belonging in Ghost Town, or how Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise confronts sexual violence and the abuse of power and authority. Spent Bullets turns to a younger generation, tracing elitism, competition, desire, jealousy, humiliation, and grief within a privileged social circle. The newly published What’s A Snow Leopard to You? (2026), likewise, brings attention to humanity’s shared concern with nature and landscape, entwined with culture, history, and politics. These books show how contemporary Taiwan literature speaks from highly specific historical and social conditions while engaging questions that are immediately legible beyond Taiwan.
Another important genre that shapes our collection is graphic narrative. We included the entire series of YAN (2025, 2026) by Chang Sheng, The Boy from Clearwater (2023, 2024) by Yu Pei-Yun and Zhou Jian-Xin, and Day Off (2024, 2026) by Dailygreens. Interestingly, all of them have very different narratives and stories: YAN is about a teenage Peking Opera performer who was once imprisoned for being accused of murdering her family; The Boy from Clearwater is based on the real-life story of a White Terror victim, Tsai Kun-lin; and Day Off is a BL (boys’ love) office romance. Despite differences, they share eye-catching graphics and alluring stories, and suit both young and adult readers.
Taiwanese American Literature
One aspect that distinguishes our curation is its inclusion of Taiwanese American literature alongside works written in and translated from Taiwan. Instead of treating “Taiwan literature” as a category with fixed geographic or linguistic boundaries, we approach it as a field of relation—one that extends through migration, family memory, inheritance, translation, and diasporic experience. Taiwanese American writers bring into the collection stories shaped by distance from Taiwan as much as by connection to it: stories of immigration, second-generation identity, intergenerational tension, cultural transmission, and the reimagining of “Taiwan” in different places and languages. The collection asks what happens when Taiwan is carried, remembered, translated, and reimagined across borders, and invites readers to see literary belonging not as a question of where a work is incubated, but of the histories, relationships, and communities through which it moves, resonating with our theme of a slow-cooked meal.
In particular, as we began curating, we noticed many cookbooks and food-related titles by Taiwanese American authors. Clarissa Wei’s Made In Taiwan (2023) and recently published Sitting the Month (2026) led our exploration. Win Son, one of New York City’s most popular restaurants serving Taiwanese American cuisine, also published a cookbook, Win Son Presents a Taiwanese American Cookbook (2023). Another unique find is George Lee’s A-Gong’s Table: Vegan Recipes from a Taiwanese Home (2024) for its focus on vegan recipes. There are, unfortunately, more titles that we hoped but couldn’t include, such as Yun Hai Tatung Family Cookbook, TASTE TAIWAN: Recipes from Taiwanese Home Kitchens, First Generation: Recipes from my Taiwanese-American Home, Taiwanese?: A Rambling Reflection on the Recipes, Cultures, and People Defining this Island, among others. Beyond cookbooks, renowned Taiwanese American novelist Ed Lin also has a fan-favourite series, “Taipei Night Market series,” with five books available. Many children’s books also feature night markets, bubble tea, luroufan, and other homemade cuisines, which we will discuss more in the next article. These reveal how food and diaspora are bound together through the everyday acts of cooking, tasting, and remembering: flavours become a way of carrying home across borders and reimagining belonging.
Shawna Yang Ryan’s Green Island (2016) and Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest (2019) also allowed us to expand the collection beyond literature written from within Taiwan, while showing how differently diaspora can mediate historical memory. Ryan’s Green Island, in particular, can be read alongside Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White (2025): both return to the White Terror and ask how authoritarian violence persists beyond the moment of repression, entering family relationships, silence, displacement, and everyday life. Yet their perspectives are markedly different. Portraits in White stays close to ordinary lives within Taiwan, tracing how political fear becomes woven into intimate and domestic experience, while Green Island follows the afterlife of that history across migration to the United States, where inherited trauma continues to shape a family far from the island itself. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest offers another diasporic mode of return: it moves through family history, language, landscape, and ecology, using Taiwan’s mountains, forests, and coastlines to think about ancestry and belonging. These works show how Taiwan continues to be remembered, revisited, and reconstructed not only from within but also from elsewhere.
Taiwan Is Never A Single Story
Despite our best efforts, there are still more books we hope to include than the ones we already have. Most of the time, the reason why we had to “skip” a book is mostly technical. Besides being out of print, like most of Pai Hsien-yung’s books, for instance, the book has not yet been translated into or published in English. This is certainly not a problem with the books, but solely with the fact that the book festival would be hosted in the US and the Anglophone-centric nature of the reading culture. Li Ang’s An Erotic Feast for Lovebirds (2007; Yuanyang chunmeng) is a unique take on food and eroticism that we really wanted to include. It was published in French as Le banquet aphrodisiaque (2023) and adapted into a graphic novel (2025) by Lau Kwong Shing, but no English translation is available. Likewise, Hong Ai-Chu’s A Girl Can Cook: Street Foods, Traditional Markets, and Home Cooking from Taiwan and Beyond (2021) also suits our theme perfectly, with original Taiwanese Mandarin and Japanese (2022) editions available.
Another surprising difficulty we encountered was with the purchase platforms. Stranger Press in the UK published a series of five chapbooks by Lâu Tsí-û, Qiu Miaojin, Lulyang Nomin, Sabrina Huang, and Lamulu Pakawyan, respectively, in 2024. Unfortunately, two were already out of stock, and the rest couldn’t be easily purchased in the US. (Of course, we blamed it on the US distribution service, not the publisher.) Similarly, the English version of Huang Chong-Kai’s Formosa Exchange (2026) was published by Honford Star the same month as the Book Festival. Unfortunately, the book would not arrive in time, as it was shipped all the way from the UK.
Last but not least, we just couldn’t have them all! We initially aimed for 50 to 60 books for the two-day festival, but ended up with almost 90 in total. Most of our collection was publications released in the past decade, especially in the 2020s.
Two books we didn’t get to include but wanted to highlight are Ping Lu’s To the East of the East and Li Kotomi’s Solo Dance (2022). Both were published by World Editions. We didn’t realise this until we saw the publisher’s social media post and spotted the two books in their photo: in a parallel universe where the Book Festival wasn’t cancelled, they would have been featured and sold at World Editions’ booth, including Ping Lu’s yet-to-be-officially-published one. Despite not being able to feature them ourselves, we might be able to direct visitors at our booth to theirs for these two titles.
Taiwan is never a single story. As mentioned in the previous article, food and cooking provide an especially inviting starting point for the exhibition. Across the selected books, food opens onto much larger questions: colonial and postcolonial histories, cultural translation, family memory, local life, and relationships between people and place. “Slow-cooked” therefore functions not simply as a culinary theme, but as a way of thinking about how history and culture accumulate, mingle, and transform over time.
Chee-Hann Wu, Ph.D., is an independent scholar in performance studies who is drawn to performance of, by, and with nonhumans, including but not limited to objects, puppets, ecology, and technology. Her most recent work explores video games, VR, and artificial intelligence. In her free time, Chee-Hann writes about art, literature, and popular culture. cheehannwu.com.
This article was published as part of the special issue on ‘Stories from Taiwan across Time’.