by Megan Walsh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 8, 2022
A succinct, fascinating overview of literary ambivalence in China.
The gripping yet uneasy state of literature in China.
Journalist Walsh’s first book is an eye-opening glimpse into China’s “intentionally hazy” authoritarian political climate of censorship and propaganda, which disorientates its fiction scene—a “mixture of staggering invention, bravery, and humanity, as well as soul-crushing submission and pragmatism.” China is in the midst of a science-fiction golden age thanks to novels like Liu Cixin’s global bestseller, The Three-Body Problem(2015), among others. Walsh describes how many young writers embrace online or self-publishing to bypass China’s state-controlled publishing program as they “reveal the truth and highlight what is still hidden.” Mo Yan, the Nobel Prize–winning author, is both praised and condemned as a mouthpiece for the state; Walsh calls his fiction “garrulous, feverish, and often smutty.” Female author Wei Hui’s 1999 erotic bestseller, Shanghai Baby, showed that in “China’s new market economy sex and controversy were great for business.” The rise of China’s internet and its rural migrant workers spawned the most comprehensive poetry movement in the world, while Lu Yao’s novels portrayed “poor, rural idealists dreaming up a new life in the city.” Walsh chronicles how hugely popular, escapist online fantasy novels reveal the “mercenary, amoral instincts of the market.” The government has cashed in with its own University of Online Fiction, with Mo Yan “nominally at the helm, a move he finds as peculiar as anyone else.” Largely dominated by Japanese manga, China has “become the biggest comic book market in the world,” with its underground comics scene providing a transgressive and masochistic view of the world. Tibetan and Han Chinese writers, writes Walsh, “have played a controversial role in both the elevation and erosion of ethnic difference.” In a society with a draconian legal system, crime fiction lags far behind SF. As Walsh cautiously writes, it’s “hard to say what the future holds.”
A succinct, fascinating overview of literary ambivalence in China.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7359136-6-7
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
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by Alok Vaid-Menon ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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More In The Series
by Shavone Charles ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Leo Baker ; illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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