Demand The Immediate Release of Liu Xiabo
Back on December 11th, Liu Xiabo was formally indicted by the Beijing Municipal Procuratorate for “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge that is often leveled against writers the Chinese government wishes to silence. Here’s a bit more background info from PEN America: Liu Xiaobo is a renowned ...
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NY Times on "Woman from Shanghai"
Earlier in the month we posted a piece by Chinese translator—and amazingly nice guy—Wen Huang about Xianhui Yang’s collection of “stories” Woman from Shanghai. And no, those aren’t unnecessary quotes—these pieces are based on real-life events, with added fictional/literary aspects in ...
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The Frankfurt Book Fair's Press Trip to China
As mentioned last week, China is the Guest of Honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, and to prepare for this, four journalists from the FBF have headed over to Peking on a “journey of literary discovery.” (Which I believe means listening to a lot of speeches about China’s book industry and traveling ...
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Portrait of a 1989 “Counter-revolutionary”
Liao Yiwu is the author of “The Corpse Walkers: Real Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up.” On June 4, 1989, Liao composed a poem, “Massacre,” that condemned the government’s brutal crackdown on the student pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square. He distributed underground and for which he was ...
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A Tribute to the Chinese Earthquake Victims
My friend Wen Huang — translator of Liao Yiwu’s The Corpse Walker and Xianhui Yang’s Woman from Shanghai — contacted me this morning about the article below that Liao Yiwu wrote in remembrance of the one year anniversary of the devastating Beichuan earthquake. As referenced in passing in the piece ...
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Latest Review: Brothers by Yu Hua
If things go right, I think we’ll be running five reviews this week—which definitely makes up for the one we skipped last week. Up first is Yu Hua’s Brothers, a very long novel, very ambitious novel about two boys growing up in China during the period of the Cultural Revolution and the economic boom that ...
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Brothers
As detailed in the profile of Yu Hua in the New York Times Magazine, he’s considered to be one of China’s most important contemporary writers. In fact, two of his novels — To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant — were honored in China as two of the most influential books of the last decade. But ...
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