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'The Conjure Man' Peter Damian Bellis
Peter Damian Bellis’s novel, set in the deep bigoted South of revival meetings, alligator hunts, Spanish moss and bible bashing lynch mobs occupies a similar fictional territory to Faulkner and Peter...
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'Taipei People' Bai Xien Yong
When I first arrived in Taiwan over 20 years ago and was looking for somewhere to live, one of the places I went to see was a room in the house of an elderly widow. Her house was one of those old...
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'Skulls of Istria' Rick Harsch
Towards the end of Rick Harsch’s new novel the protagonist – an American historian on the lam in Europe, on the Croatian coast to be precise - falls into an underground crypt filled with skulls, a...
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'Notes of a Crocodile' Qiu Miaojin
If I learned anything about life during college, it was to turn away from my shattered ego and move on.Notes of a Crocodile describes the college years of a young gay Taiwanese woman, her various...
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'Existence: A Story' David Hinton
We are looking at a painting by the great Ming Dynasty landscape artist and Chan Master Shi Tao: a scholar (with attendant) on a promontory gazing out over a sea of mist to ridges of hazy mountains in...
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'Renegade, or Halo2' Timothy Mo
Globalisation, an American dictionary informs us, is ‘the removal of barriers between national economies to encourage the flow of goods, services, capital, and labor’. Well, in practice, of course, it...
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'The Street of Crocodiles' Bruno Schulz
It’s not often I find myself agreeing with Jonathan Safran Foer (it’s not often I find anything he says interesting enough to take issue with either way, but that’s beside the point), but when he says...
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'Diary of a Madman and Other Stories' Lu Xun
Lu Xun’s two published collections of short stories, Cheering From the Sidelines, (1922) and Wondering Where to Turn (1925) reveal him as one of the supreme masters of the short story to rank alongside...
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'The Mad Patagonian' Javier Pedro Zabala
It’s probably fair to say that Javier Pedro Zabala is the greatest Latin American writer you’ve never heard of, and his magnum opus The Mad Patagonian is the greatest novel in Spanish of the 21st...
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'Dream of Red Mansions' Cao Xueqin
I live in town without all that rackethorses and carts stir up, and you wonderhow that could be. Wherever the minddwells apart is itself a distant place.picking chrysanthemums at my east fence,far off,...
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Fragment 2412014
In Qian Zhongshu's classic Chinese novel of 1947 Fortress Besieged the protagonist Hung Chien is teaching at a brand new university in the interior of China, far from the fighting. The university, with...
View ArticleJohn Blofeld on Richard Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching
Those readers who positively like their oracles to be couched in terms so obscure as to be inscrutable will prefer Wilhelm's version to mine, as parts of it are obscure enough to satisfy the most...
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"Empire of Signs" Roland Barthes
Barthes's book on Japan belongs to the same genre as Swift's Gullivers’ Travels, Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Voltaire's Candide and as Barthes himself signals, Micheax's Garabagne. In this genre,...
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"Hijikata: The Revolt of the Body" Stephen Barber
I have recently become acquainted with a young Taiwanese butoh dancer, and I read this book to learn more about his art. Butoh was started by the dancer Hijikata in the ruins of a bombed out Tokyo in...
View ArticleSchopenhauer on the urge to display one's stupidity on the internet
There are very many thoughts which have value for him who thinks them, but only a few of them possess the power of engaging the interest of a reader after they have been written down.
View ArticleNietzsche on Christianity
Christianity is, essentially and fundamentally, the embodiment of disgust and antipathy for life, merely disguised, concealed, got up as the belief in an 'other' life, or a 'better' life. Hatred of the...
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'The French Revolution: A History' Thomas Carlyle
In the opening chapter of his ground-defining book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, the Edwardian critic and poet Arthur Symonds quotes this dictum from Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution:...
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'Fortress Besieged' Qian Zhongshu
Hell is a Chinese family, and the Devil is a Chinese woman. Apocryphal sayingIf this book had been written by a foreigner, the writer would have been accused of racism at worst, or cultural chauvinism...
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'Kazuo Ohno’s World From Without and Within' Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno
This is a compilation of two pieces: Workshop Words by Kazuo (Ohno pere) (1997) and Food for the Soul by Yoshito (Ohno fils) (1999) both appearing in English for the first time. The book is richly...
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'Mr Selden’s Map of China' Timothy Brook
All Isles and Continents (which are indeed but greater Isles) are so seated, that there is none, but that, from some shore of it, another may be discovered.John Selden Historie of TithesIn 2009 an...
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