China

  • This Week in Trumplandia

    Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself,…

  • This Week in Essays

    At The California Sunday Magazine, Brooke Jarvis has a devastating piece about missing persons and family members lost over the border. For VIDA, Jean Ho shares her discouraging experience at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. And here at The Rumpus, Chellis Ying writes…

  • David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 7): “Facing It”

    David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 7): “Facing It”

    There should be no forgetting, much less forgiveness, of what happened during the Vietnam War.

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    Just announced today: beloved Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt is closing after 35 years in business. Independent booksellers were the focus of a panel at the Miami Book Fair—discussion focused on how big business was surprised that small business strategies could be useful in…

  • Fitting Characters and Scripts

    Fitting Characters and Scripts

    Unwittingly, my mother teaches me in this conversation her generation’s word for gay: 同性恋. I look it up in an online dictionary, three characters in my mother’s tongue. Same, sex, and love.

  • “I Will Climb, Too”

    “I Will Climb, Too”

    I assume he’s going to drop us off, wish us luck, and speed away. But instead Little Wei slams on his brakes, turns off the ignition, and says, “I will climb, too.”

  • The Rumpus Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang

    The Rumpus Interview with Esmé Weijun Wang

    Esmé Weijun Wang discusses her first novel, The Border of Paradise, about a multi-generational new American family, creative expression through writing and photography, and interracial relationships.

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    A state run bookstore in Shanghai is ripping out pages from Webster’s Dictionary that include a reference to Taiwan. The Dallas Morning News checks in with Deep Vellum Books, the bookstore offshoot of Deep Vellum Publishing that owner Will Evans…

  • Weekly Geekery

    The plot thickens: literary fiction may not affect empathy after all. China’s solution to producing entrepreneurs? Science fiction. Kids of all races prefer black and Latinx teachers to whites. Science says: everything you learned about sexuality is wrong. Take back…

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    Baby Boomers are finding bookstore ownership offers an enticing second career. The Internet, once a threat, could save independent bookstores. A ninety-year-old man runs bookstore in Suzhou, China that he inherited from his grandfather. The Community Bookstore in Brooklyn has…

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    The Feminist Bookstore made famous by Portlandia has kicked the show out, saying the show “throws trans femmes under the bus.” Specialty bookstores are finding that filling a niche is often the best way to survive the onslaught of online competition.…

  • Facing Reality in China’s “Ultra-Unreal” Literature

    A literary movement aiming to express the surrealist daily life of modern China (a reality that can’t be captured by traditional genres like satire or horror) is giving the next generation of Chinese authors the opportunity to subtly critique their…