Cha invites authors, editors, translators, publishers, and readers to propose books, films, or other cultural productions for extended featured coverage in the journal, including single-author features.

Extended coverage like this often begins with the editor-in-chief’s own enthusiasm for the work. Cha currently operates without institutional backing, which makes selectivity essential: the time and energy required can be immense, and even when interest is strong, the effort does not always come together.

What featured coverage looks like at Cha

Unlike a single review, featured works receive multi-piece attention from critics and contributors writing in different registers: reviews, essays, conversations, and excerpts. Reviews alone can take up to six months to appear, sometimes longer; features require even more coordination. Still, we are eager to do more.

Select recent examples include:

• Goodbye Chinatown by Kit Fan (World Editions, 2026) prompted five separate pieces. Angus Stewart opened with an essay on taste, pain, and fate as interlocking structures in the novel. Susan Blumberg-Kason read its title against the permanence of endings, arguing that the goodbyes in the book are never quite final. Jennifer Eagleton examined inheritance and reinvention. Jason S Polley contributed the most expansive piece: a Cantonese-inflected essay-length reckoning that opened with his own championing of Diamond Hill before turning to what Fan does differently here. Jonathan Han closed the sequence with a reading of the novel through the politics of taste: food, class, and cultural belonging braided together.
  .
  
• Mending Bodies by Hon Lai Chu, translated by Jacqueline Leung (Two Lines Press, 2025), drew reviewers and scholars across seven months: Susan Blumberg-Kason on the book’s transformation from magical realism to political prophecy since its original 2010 Chinese publication; Jennifer Eagleton reading conjoinment against Hong Kong’s own political history; Tin Yuet Tam on language and bodily autonomy; Grace En-Yi Ting on patriarchal figures and the female researcher; Luca Griseri on alienation and moral stasis; Charlie Ng pairing the novel with the film Together (2025) to examine body horror as form.
  .
  
• Owlish by Dorothy Tse, translated by Natascha Bruce (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023), attracted five pieces across 2023 and into 2024. Susan Blumberg-Kason opened with a First Impressions piece (and inaugurated the First Impressions section!) on the novel’s collapsing of past and present Hong Kong. Jennifer Wong read it as a novel of camouflaged desires and the survival strategies of those who cannot fully see—or refuse to see—what is happening around them. Michelle Suen offered a theoretically ambitious piece, tracing the novel’s debt to Walter Benjamin through the name “Nevers” and situating Tse’s allegorical world-building within Hong Kong cultural studies. Ilaria Maria Sala catalogued the novel’s literary undercurrents: Calvino, Kafka, Orwell, classical Chinese and Japanese shape-shifting tales and argued that for every subtle reference a reader can spot, many more remain hidden in plain sight. Luca Griseri, writing in 2024, took the novel’s protagonists to task: neither Maria nor Q, he reasoned, is truly “owlish” at all.
  .
  
• The Life of Tu Fu by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions, 2024) received two reviews. Jeff Tompkins, writing in May 2024 shortly after publication, focused on the book’s generic strangeness: neither translation nor biography but something he called a “remix,” in which Weinberger’s pandemic-era immersion in Tu Fu’s 1,400 poems produced fifty-eight original poems that evoke a life through its residue, bringing Weinberger full circle from the translator who gave up writing verse to the poet who found another way in. Juan José Morales, returning to the book in November, came from a more personal place, reading it through his own history with Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley’s translations, finding deep comfort in the images, and taking note of Weinberger’s decision to retain Wade-Giles romanisation as itself a kind of fidelity.
  .
  
• Last Day of My Face by James Shea (University of Iowa Press, 2025) drew three pieces. Jennifer Eagleton read it as a prize-winning collection preoccupied with loss, mortality, and the difficulty of self-knowledge, tracing its Asian sensibilities (the Zen echoes of Cold Mountain, the Daoist wuwei in Shea’s “Skidding Meditations”) and dwelling on the long closing poem “Failed Self-portrait,” in which Shea acknowledges he cannot offer readers a definitive portrait of who he is. Chris Song’s essay was a different kind of piece: part criticism, part memoir, situating Shea’s poetry within Hong Kong’s Anglophone literary community and his own decade-long friendship with the poet, from their first meeting in Bangkok in 2013 through years of collaboration in the city, reading the collection as the work of a poet shaped by two cities and as a document of a Hong Kong literary moment now scattered. Jonathan Han’s review, published in March 2026, approached the collection through its relationship to time and space.
  .
  
• Jeffrey Wasserstrom has been reviewed in Cha across four books. Susan Blumberg-Kason reviewed the original Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports, 2020) when it first appeared. The 2025 Brixton Ink edition, retitled Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong and substantially reframed with a new preface, a foreword by journalist Amy Hawkins, and an afterword by former Hong Kong Free Press editor Kris Cheng, drew two further pieces: David R. Stroup on the book’s enduring relevance as a document of memory, resistance, and repression; and Wayne Wong reading it as something transformed, a piece of portable memory circulating as contraband, carrying what Hong Kong no longer dares to say aloud. The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (Columbia Global Reports, 2025) drew two reviews of its own: Shui-yin Sharon Yam on transnational youth activism as resistance, and Nick Zeller situating the Alliance within a longer intellectual genealogy of pan-Asian democratic struggle. Everything You Wanted to Know About China (But Were Afraid to Ask) (2026) drew two First Impressions on the same day, from Susan Blumberg-Kason and Jennifer Eagleton, approaching its accessibility from different readerly positions.
  .
  
• Cultural Mavericks: The Business and Politics of Independent Bookselling in China by Zheng Liu (Cambridge University Press, 2026) drew three essays that could hardly have come from more different vantage points. Laurence Westwood, a retired British criminal investigator and crime novelist, opened with his own boyhood memories of a dimly lit secondhand bookshop in an unnamed UK city, and read the book largely against the grain: skeptical of Liu’s central claim about Chinese exceptionalism, unconvinced by the distinction between duli shudian and Western independent bookshops, and critical of the book’s near-silence on censorship and state politics, which he argued was what made Chinese bookselling most distinct. X. H. Collins, a Chinese-American diaspora writer who grew up beneath the counters of a Xinhua Bookstore in Sichuan where her father worked, and has now lived in Iowa for nearly thirty years, brought an insider’s warmth and a diaspora’s doubled vision: she pushed back against the Western “resistance narrative” Liu critiques, traced her own partial estrangement from China through the lens of bookshops visited on return trips, and wove in photographs from a visit to a Sisyphe branch in Chengdu in August 2025, leaving with a Tagore bilingual edition and a list of independent bookshops to explore next time. Raymond Pun brought a third standpoint: that of a working librarian, reading the book for what it illuminated about access, curation, and the politics of collection.
  .
  
• Remixing Wong Kar-wai: Music, Bricolage, and the Aesthetics of Oblivion by Giorgio Biancorosso (Duke University Press, 2025) drew two very different pieces. Mario Rustan’s review approached the book as an enthusiastic guide to Wong’s filmography, tracing Biancorosso’s argument that Wong’s practice of poaching pre-existing music from Chinese melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters, and European art films constitutes a form of creative destruction, in which familiar music loses its previous associations and acquires new meaning within his films. Rustan followed the book’s argument across Wong’s career from his TVB beginnings and his early action screenwriting through to the arthouse films that made him an international figure, reading Biancorosso’s framework of bricolage and the “aesthetic of oblivion” as a generous and illuminating way into the films. Anna Nguyen’s essay, arriving two weeks later, took a different stance from its title alone: “Remixing Memory, Forgetting Politics.” She opened with her own experience of watching a 1992 TVB drama dubbed in Vietnamese, straining to catch Faye Wong’s “容易受傷的女人” through the copyright muting, and tracing that song’s lineage back through Vietnamese covers to the Japanese original “Rouge” by Naomi Chiaki in 1977, a genealogy she discovered later. That personal archaeology led her to her central question: what does Biancorosso’s musicological framework of bricolage and oblivion leave out? She argued, ultimately, that the book remixes away the politics embedded in the music and the memories it carries.

Cha also publishes single-author features combining some or all of the following: an author essay, an excerpt, an interview, and a review. Leslie Shimotakahara’s feature on The Breakwater (Cormorant Books, 2026), a multigenerational novel about Japanese Canadian internment and a decades-long family secret, paired an author essay on memory, research, and the imaginative recovery of erased places with an excerpt and a separate review. Troy Cabida’s feature on Neon Manila (Nine Arches Press, 2025) combined an essay on the collection’s balancing act between sparkle and substance with four poems from the book. Matthew Wong Foreman’s feature on Sunset at Lion Rock (Proverse Press, 2024) brought together an essay on Hong Kong identity and an excerpt from the novel.

What we are looking for

Works with a strong connection to Asian literature, culture, history, or diaspora experience. Books, films, or cultural productions that reward conversation and invite multiple critical perspectives. Projects at any stage: forthcoming, recently published, or overlooked titles that deserve a second look. We also encourage proposals for works that have already appeared in Cha once, as we take pleasure in returning to a title from a new angle.

How to pitch

Send a short pitch of no more than 150 words to cha@asiancha.com with “Pitch” in the subject line. Include the title, author, and publisher; a brief description of the work and its relevance to Cha‘s readership; and a sentence or two on why it merits sustained attention rather than a single review. For single-author features, note whether the author would be available to contribute an essay or excerpt.

The pitches that lead somewhere share a few qualities: they come from people who know what Cha is and what it publishes; they are specific about why the work fits; and they make it easy to say yes. A pitch that arrives with absolutely no knowledge of the journal, or only a casual familiarity with it, is unlikely to proceed. The same is true of pitches framed primarily as requests for exposure.

Pitches are welcome from authors, translators, publicists, and readers alike. Submitting a proposal does not guarantee acceptance; featured coverage is editorially driven, and we may also reach out to propose coverage ourselves.

Cha is an Asia-focused publication. Questions? Write to cha@asiancha.com.