China
-
This Week in Indie Bookstores
To celebrate Small Business Saturday, President Obama shopped at Upshur Street Books in the Petworth neighborhood of Washington DC. Magers & Quinn, an independent Minneapolis bookseller, has been open on Thanksgiving for the last thirteen years—mostly to provide employees without family…
-
Do You Eat Pork?: Identity Politics in the Borderlands
The ethnic conflict wears me down. I am tired of being put in boxes, tired of explaining why I don’t fit. I sleep less and less.
-
The Poetry of Liu Xia
Liu Xia’s burden has become too heavy. Her heart is beginning to fail. In isolation, she can only stare at a tree through her window, a tree that a bird can only dwell on: Is it a tree? It’s me,…
-
Neil Gaiman Versus China
The Guardian reports that Neil Gaiman has added his name to a letter urging China’s president Xi Jinping to release dissident writers “languishing in jail for the crime of expressing their opinions.” In addition to Gaiman, several other famed authors, including Jonathan Franzen and…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Susan Barker
Susan Barker discusses her third novel, The Incarnations, writing dialogue in a second language, the Opium Wars and Chinese history, and the years of research that went into her book.
-
Meet the Oldest Multicolor Printed Book
At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier offers a history of the oldest multicolor printed book, recently digitized and published online by the Cambridge University Library system. The manual [the 17th-century Manual of Calligraphy and Painting (Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu)] is…
-
This Week in Short Fiction
On Monday, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction was awarded to Jack Livings for The Dog, a collection set in China in the last decades of the 20th century. What makes Livings’s stories remarkable isn’t just the tight…
-
Do Governments Make Bad Editors?
When the Chinese government created a China-themed pavilion at this year’s BookExpo America, several writers protested the event. Writer Andrew Solomon argued that the Chinese government used that expo as a platform to present their “approved literature to the world.”…
-
Censorship Taints Publishing Bonanza
China represents a huge marketplace for any product, and book publishers have finally caught on. More than 10,000 Chinese books were available at the Book Expo America. But as publishers race to embrace the Chinese market and bring Chinese authors to…
-
Santa’s Little Helper
Santa’s elves spend all year manufacturing low-cost holiday decorations to bring Westerners Christmas cheer. The only problem? They aren’t elves, but Chinese factory workers. The Guardian explores life in the Chinese “Christmas Village” responsible for 60% of the world’s holiday…
-
Good Writing and Bad Surveillance
The idea of “good writing” is shaped by social forces—that are in turn shaped by economic and historical forces—and our own identity privileges and privileges as editors (if we are editors). Determining what is good or bad is an aesthetic…
