One spine per woman
A patent examiner in Pune, a geologist in Ulaanbaatar, a hotel manager in Chiang Mai, a ferry pilot in Penang: the spines do not agree about genre, and they are not meant to. Each author has a day job she is good at, a town she can describe with her eyes shut, and a manner of writing that gives her away in a line. Tip a spine out and you get a cover with her name, her town and a line about herself.
We chose the shelf over a grid of faces because a face asks what you think of her, and a spine asks what you would like to read. The authors are Taiwanese, Thai, Indian, Korean, Malaysian, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Kazakh, Japanese and Pakistani, and none of them is a type. Each is a person with a sentence she keeps coming back to.