August 6, 2009

Zhu Wen’s filthy fiction

Julia Lovell, translator of Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars and Other Stories, has a great article on China Beat that discusses the author’s currently untranslated novella My Little Brother’s Performance (Didi de yanzou). The novella recounts, in often graphic detail,...

August 5, 2009

Ang Lee

With the complete retrospective of his films currently running at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and with his next film Taking Woodstock due to release later this month, Ang Lee is once again in the news. For those interested...

August 4, 2009

Christopher Davidson, author of Abu Dhabi, takes The Page 99 Test

Taking Ford Maddox Ford’s suggestion to heart (“Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you”), the Page 99 Test asks authors to focus in on this particular page. The...

August 3, 2009

Eating History: Thirty Points in the Making of American Cuisine

Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, by Andrew Smith, is not due until October, but with Michael Pollan‘s article in the New York Times Magazine, published on Sunday, on the way Americans now eat and...

August 3, 2009

A Fistful of Euros reviews Gianni Vattimo's "Autobiography"

A Fistful of Euros, a prominent blog focusing on European politics and culture recently reviewed Gianni Vattimo’s Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography calling it “a delicious mix of philosophy, history, politics, ‘gayness’ and the personal experiences and thoughts of...

July 31, 2009

Salon takes on the Huffington Post's coverage of health and science

In a Salon article already generating a lot of discussion on the Internet, Dr. Rahul K. Parikh suggests that the Huffington Post’s coverage of health and wellness issues “seems defined mostly by bloggers who are friends of [Arianna] Huffington or...

July 31, 2009

Health care for the Blue Dogs — Jacob Hacker

Earlier this week, Jacob Hacker, editor of Health at Risk: America’s Health System—And How to Heal It, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post on the “Blue Dog” Democrats’ apprehension about Obama’s health care plan. Hacker argues that while the...

July 30, 2009

James Millward revisits the Urumchi unrest

In an essay for the Web site China Beat, James Millward, author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang, examines the recent violence earlier this month in the western Chinese city of Urumchi and the disputed claims about what caused...

July 29, 2009

Acts of Conscience and the history of radical pacifism in the United States

Speaking of titles (see below), the excellent blog Religion in American History has been looking at two books with the same title: Acts of Conscience. More precisely, there has been essays about Columbia’s Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern...

July 29, 2009

Well Titled, Well Covered features There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night

The New Yorker‘s blog The Book Bench recently featured Cao Naiqian’s There’s Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night in their “Well Titled, Well Covered” feature. Here’s how they explain their criteria for their well...

July 28, 2009

The Los Angeles Times on Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Work and Days

July 28, 2009

Adressing the ideological confusion at the heart of Pakistan

On the Web site Rorotoko, Farzana Shaikh, author of Making Sense of Pakistan, explains the main arguments of her book and the ways in which they challenge conventional interpretations Pakistani politics and history. (For more on Shaikh’s book, which has...