China
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Sci-Fi Tide Sweeps through China
Science fiction is a growing force on the Chinese literary landscape now that government scrutiny of the genre has loosened up, according to a recent article in the Times. The English publication of Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem, following…
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Weekly Geekery
Are video games the new social commentary? Are we ready to give them the weight of other media? The Internet is fomenting another revolution. Librarians: bespectacled superheroes for your rights. Growing a library. A book written pre-Internet, sheds light on…
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Why You Should Care About Hong Kong
They may be only seven million, a small dot on the globe, but what is happening right now in Hong Kong might have deeper implications than you think.
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Hamlet
Shakespeare is invading China. The first complete Chinese translation of the works of Shakespeare wasn’t released until 1967, but Britain’s number one dramatist is now starting to catch the attention of Chinese audiences, reports Melville House’s Moby Lives, saying Shakespeare…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Emily Parker
“If you are a critic of the Chinese government, it’s not easy to organize a physical gathering. Beijing cracks down hard on that kind of thing. But online, critics find they are not alone.”
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Do Writers Also Have to Be Protesters?
Pankaj Mishra has always been a politically outspoken writer, so when Mo Yan, who has defended the Chinese government’s censorship, won the Nobel Prize, Mishra was the last person anyone expected to defend him. But he did, asking, “Do we…
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“That Pesky Racism Again”
For Human Parts, the dazzling collection of essays curated by Stephanie Georgopulos on Medium, Djenab Conde writes about the complexities of eating at a Chinese restaurant with her Chinese mother and Guinean father. Conde writes about how frustrating it is…
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Lit-Link Round-Up
This is my second-to-last round-up before I go on hiatus for my book tour, which is a sprawling, insane thing that’s lasting until the end of April, on and off. That’s nothing, of course, compared to the duration of some…
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Mark Twain Still Popular…In China!
Did you know that Mark Twain is one of the best known foreign writers in China? Neither did we. There is a well earned, and unabashed image of Mark Twain as the quintessential American author and for good reason. The…
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A Ghost Story’s Ghost Story
Everyone loves a good ghost story, and one of the most popular ghost stories in the Chinese literary canon is that of Li Huiniang, a cruelly executed concubine who fights for justice from beyond the grave. At the Appendix, Maggie Greene…
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The Remarkable Life of China’s “AIDS Granny”
In the 1980s, when it became apparent that HIV was blood-borne, China banned blood donations from outside the country—but instituted no other HIV-related tests or regulations, not even against reusing needles. HIV quickly began to spread among those giving and receiving…
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A Zealot and a Poet
I like to imagine him out there on his beast of burden, vast grey country on all sides and a book of poetry open in his hand. It is a romantic image and, when I think only of it, I…