For a long time, silk, tea, sinocentrism, and eurocentrism made up a big patch of East Asian history. Simultaneously deviating from and complicating these tags, this edited volume reconstructs narratives from the periphery and considers marginal voices located beyond official archives as the centre of East Asian history. The lives of the Japanese Buddhist monks, Eastern Han local governors, Confucian scholars, Chinese coolies, Shanghainese tailors, Macau joss-stick makers, Hong Long locals, and Cantonese working-class musicians featured in this collection provide us with a glimpse of how East Asia’s inhabitants braved, with versatility, the ripples of political centralization, cross-border movement, foreign imperialism, nationalism, and globalism that sprouted locally and universally. Demonstrating the rich texture of sources discovered through non-official pathways, the ten essays in this volume ultimately reveal the timeless interconnectedness of East Asia and the complex, non-uniform worldviews of its inhabitants.

Julio Ramón Ribeyro has been widely acclaimed Peru's master storyteller. Until now, however, few of his stories have been translated into English. This volume brings together fifteen stories written during the period 1952-1975, which were collected in the three volumes of La palabra del mudo.

Ribeyro's stories treat the social problems brought about by urban expansion, including poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, class struggles, alienation, and violence. At the same time, elements of the fantastic playfully interrupt some of the stories. As Ribeyro's characters become swept up in circumstances beyond their understanding, we see that the only freedom or dignity left them comes from their own imaginations.

The fifteen stories included here are "Terra Incognita," "Barbara," "The Featherless Buzzards," "Of Modest Color," "The Substitute Teacher," "The Insignia," "The Banquet," "Alienation (An Instructive Story with a Footnote)," "The Little Laid Cow," "The Jacaranda Trees," "Bottles and Men," "Nothing to Do, Monsieur Baruch," "The Captives," "The Spanish," and "Painted Papers."