Books by Amy Stanley
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
by Amy Stanley
🏆 Winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for the best biography
âś© Shortlisted for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by historian Amy Stanley opens at the turn of the 19th century, and tries to bring to life the world of a woman called Tsuneno, the daughter of a Buddhist priest who ends up working in Edo (modern Tokyo) and marrying a Samurai (unhappily). The writing is beautiful and evocative and it is rather wonderful to have early modern Japan recreated by a historian using novelistic techniques.
“Amy Stanley tells the story of how Edo became Tokyo through the life of Tsuneno, daughter of a Buddhist priest in a rural province at a moment that Japan’s transformation is taking root. Stanley renders Tsuneno’s messy life, unique struggles and the quotidian particulars of her world so richly that that this Japanese woman from another era becomes achingly human and resonant.” Read more...
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist
Elizabeth Taylor, Biographer
Interviews where books by Amy Stanley were recommended
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1
Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
by Amy Stanley -
2
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
by Zachary D. Carter -
3
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne & Tamara Payne -
4
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
by Heather Clark -
5
The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s
by Maggie Doherty
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
The Best Biographies: the 2021 NBCC Shortlist, recommended by Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor, the author, critic and chair of the National Book Critics’ Circle biography committee, discusses their 2021 shortlist for the title of the best biography—including a revelatory new book about the life of Malcolm X, a group biography of artists in the 1960s, and a book built from a cache of letters written in Japan’s shogun era.
