Interviews Weina Dai Randel burst onto the literary scene a number of years ago with her duology about Empress Wu Zetian, China’s first woman leader. After winning the prestigious Rita Award in 2017 and seeing her novels translated into seven languages, she is back now with a new historical novel set in 1940s Shanghai. Keeping with her love of strong women characters, her new book, The Last Rose of Shanghai, centers on a nightclub owner named Aiyi Shao who falls for a Jewish refugee who had recently escaped Nazi Germany. Through their love of jazz, they develop a forbidden bond set during one of Shanghai’s most volatile and exciting eras. Randel is the first Chinese American author to write about Shanghai Jewish refugees, although there have been dozens of memoirs, narratives, and novels about this phenomenon from Jewish authors. We recently spoke over Zoom about what made Shanghai so special and why it matters now, along with the reasons Jews escaped to Shanghai during World War II and how Chinese and Jewish traditions are so similar. Susan Blumberg-Kason: It seems that the popularity of 1930s and ’40s Shanghai rose both in China and the US about twenty-five years ago. Can you talk about the appeal of this time and why it’s so special, both to people in the US and China? Weina Dai Randel: I think many aspects of Old Shanghai appeal to us today. From the late 1920s to the early 1940s, the period of Old Shanghai was a symbol of... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2022-01-20 14:33:49 UTC ]
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Users of connected TV's most popular platform are about to see a major advertising upgrade. Roku and Nielsen are shaking up the connected TV advertising landscape with a landmark deal and strategic alliance: Roku is acquiring Nielsen's advanced video advertising (AVA) business, including the... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2021-03-01 21:30:00 UTC ]
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“DER LETZTE TANZ” (“The Last Dance”) — a story by Hungarian American author Susan Taubes written in German and published posthumously — tells the story of Mary Ann, a young girl who has an on-and-off love affair with a man she calls Death. He visits her in dreams, for the first time at the age... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-26 16:00:55 UTC ]
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I also love the way that surreality and exaggeration can work in short stories in ways that they don’t often in novels. The wilder the conceit, the harder it is to sustain, like it’s rocket fuel. The post Resisting the Easy Impulse: Te-Ping Chen in Conversation with Brenda Peynado appeared first... Continue reading at The Millions
[ The Millions | 2021-02-26 10:59:07 UTC ]
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Interviews Michael Berry is a professor of Asian languages and cultures and director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He has published extensive works on addressing the richness and diversity of Chinese art and culture in sinophone... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-02-24 15:28:04 UTC ]
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Current Events On a visit to an Oklahoma City bookstore, Alex Crayon finds more than books. When I pulled into the snow-covered parking lot of Nappy Roots Books in northeast Oklahoma City, the first thing I noticed were the posters. Handwritten signs... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-02-22 21:59:22 UTC ]
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Actors Alison Oliver, Sasha Lane, Jemima Kirke and Joe Alwyn are to star in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney's novel, Conversations with Friends (Faber.) Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-17 23:11:49 UTC ]
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READING PATRICIA LOCKWOOD’S first novel feels a lot like having your brain poisoned by the internet — or at least like having that particular contemporary condition understood. No One Is Talking About This is a searing entry into the rapidly emerging pantheon of digital culture literature, told... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-16 16:00:53 UTC ]
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STEPHANIE ELIZONDO GRIEST was on tour for the hardcover publication of her 2017 book, All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She was 43 years old. “I was actually incredibly lucky that I happened to grow this Texas-sized... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-02-16 13:30:18 UTC ]
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Subscribe on Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | In a special LARB Book Club edition of the Radio Hour, Eric Newman and Boris Dralyuk sit down with R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, co-editors of Kink, a new anthology that aims to push the boundaries of traditional literary representations of love,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-01-22 20:43:36 UTC ]
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Interviews Barbara Epler started working at New Directions after graduating from college in 1984, and she has been its president and publisher since 2011. In 2015 Poets & Writers awarded Epler their Editor’s Prize, and in 2016 Words Without Borders... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2021-01-11 14:39:22 UTC ]
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The Christian Indie Publishing Association (CIPA) announced the appointment of a new director, Susan Neal, who will launch new membership benefits starting this month. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2021-01-07 05:00:00 UTC ]
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AS SOON AS I picked up Dan Chiasson’s latest book of poetry, The Math Campers, I was immediately drawn into a collaborative experience in which writer and reader make meaning together. Chiasson’s lyrical ruminations can take the form of a “choose your own adventure,” but the poet skillfully... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-01-06 18:00:18 UTC ]
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LESLIE BRODY’S new biography, Sometimes You Have to Lie, describes the life of Louise Fitzhugh, author of the classic children’s book Harriet the Spy. Originally published in 1964 by Harper and Row, Harriet has never been out of print and has inspired multiple adaptations and spin-offs,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021-01-02 13:30:00 UTC ]
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Police in Shanghai say a suspect has been detained in the death by possible poisoning of the billionaire founder of a Chinese video game company that is producing films based on popular science fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem.” Continue reading at ABC News
[ ABC News | 2020-12-28 14:47:02 UTC ]
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Interviews The Spring 2020 issue of World Literature Today explored a variety of works in the increasingly popular genre of graphic nonfiction. Now, as the year comes to a close, use of graphic media in literary storytelling is still on the rise. With... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-12-17 14:14:03 UTC ]
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Click below to watch the first virtual meeting of the Alta California Book Club, which Books Editor of Alta Journal David Ulin describes as: an opportunity for us to rethink the book club as a kind of ongoing process involving events, involving posts and interviews and discussions on the Alta... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-12-02 09:48:47 UTC ]
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JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer, editor, and journalist based in New York. From 1982 to 2000, she was an editor at The Nation magazine and co-editor, with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence (2014). She has written for CounterPunch,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-11-26 18:00:16 UTC ]
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Antiracist author Ijeoma Oluo, whose latest book is 'Mediocre,' joins Emmanuel Acho, author of 'Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man,' for a frank talk. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-11-24 15:16:34 UTC ]
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Interviews Since 2003, Jessica Cohen has published over twenty books translated from Hebrew to English. Among other honors, she shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of Grossman’s A Horse Walks... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-11-20 16:36:29 UTC ]
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FEW WRITERS MANAGE to capture the essence of the California that exists beyond the images typically offered up by film and television — palm trees, beaches, gridlock, Hollywood, Kardashians; images the rest of the country seems so willing to accept about us “out here.” Kendra Atleework’s new... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-11-01 18:00:10 UTC ]
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