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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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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CHRISTA PARRAVANI’S SEMINAL Guernica essay published last year, “Life and Death in West Virginia,” was my introduction to this author and inspired me to seek out more of her work. I was thrilled when she agreed to an interview. The personal is political, and in Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-29 19:00:52 UTC ]
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I DON’T KNOW when I first became aware of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s writing, but it was probably sometime between 1980, when Raymond Carver lauded her on the basis of her National Book Award–nominated first novel Rough Strife, and 1989, when Sven Birkerts raved about Schwartz’s PEN/Faulkner... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-29 15:00:49 UTC ]
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Interviews Ari Larissa Heinrich / Photo by Tara Pixley Ari Larissa Heinrich is the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre (New York Review Books) and Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes (forthcoming from Columbia University Press). They... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-10-27 22:09:23 UTC ]
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ON JULY 2 of this year, I interviewed the author Nadia Terranova at her mother’s house in Santa Marinella, Italy, on a Zoom call from my apartment in Santa Monica, California. Back in 2015, I’d written a review of her first novel Gli anni al contrario (The Years in Reverse) and we’d met for... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-27 17:00:01 UTC ]
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Interviews Photo by Beowulf Sheehan / Courtesy of www.tayarijones.com Tayari Jones is a New York Times best-selling author from Atlanta, Georgia. Her most recent novel, An American Marriage, won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Jones has been... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-10-22 14:14:35 UTC ]
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TAMSYN MUIR’S DEBUT NOVEL, Gideon the Ninth, the first in her Locked Tomb trilogy, exploded into the world to universal critical acclaim last year. The series doesn’t fit nearly into the castles-versus-spaceships division that characterizes much of mainstream science fiction and fantasy. It has... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-21 17:00:28 UTC ]
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Nigerian-American writer, producer, and actress Yetide Badaki, well known for acting in the TV series This Is Us and American Gods, comes from a family of storytellers. She recalls sitting by the fire as a youth and listening to her elders. “Storytelling is such a part of just being,” she says.... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-10-20 08:48:10 UTC ]
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The Center for Fiction announced the establishment of the Susan Kamil Award for Emerging Writers, a new award to honor the memory and influence of the late Kamil, who was former executive v-p and publisher of the Random House imprint. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-10-19 04:00:00 UTC ]
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LET’S DISPENSE WITH the small surprises up front. The latest outing from Smith Henderson, acclaimed author of what others might call literary fiction — his award-winning 2014 debut, Fourth of July Creek — is indeed a thriller. And it’s not a solo endeavor — he’s teamed up with a friend, Jon Marc... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-10-11 12:30:47 UTC ]
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Novelist Susan Hill and food writer Mary Berry have been awarded damehoods in the Queen's Birthday Honours, while Children's Laureate Cressida Cowell, Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo, writer and translator Daniel Hahn, short story writer and poet Kadija George Sesay and Oneworld publisher... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-10-09 08:07:59 UTC ]
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My correspondence with K-Ming Chang began with fan mail. I had recently read her flash fiction story Gloria in Split Lip—a knife-sharp story about queerness, shame, and faith—and instantly devoured the rest of her fiction and her poetry, moved by the possibilities in her writing. A Kundiman... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-24 08:48:00 UTC ]
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Penguin Random House launches The Conversation, a hub of content collections 'to combat racism and end racial inequities'—meant for families, educators, and businesses. The post PRH Opens ‘The Conversation’ To ‘Sustain Antiracist Engagement’ appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2020-09-22 19:17:06 UTC ]
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CLAUDIA RANKINE’S Just Us: An American Conversation completes a vital trilogy that includes Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Rankine’s fluid artistry is complex and human. Twenty-one intimate, and collaborative, essays, in verso and recto format, swerve... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-09-21 12:30:23 UTC ]
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THE LONG AND VARIED career of science fiction author Robert Silverberg can almost be viewed as a microcosm of the genre’s development over the past seven decades. Starting out in the world of fandom, Silverberg edited a popular zine in the early 1950s, then turned to professional writing during... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-09-18 15:00:52 UTC ]
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Daniel Yergin is a highly respected authority on energy, international politics, and economics, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, and Shattered Peace:... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-18 08:47:31 UTC ]
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John Sargent departs as CEO of Macmillan on January 1, 2021 because of 'disagreements regarding the direction of Macmillan,' says Stefan von Holtzbrinck. The post Macmillan: Don Weisberg To Succeed John Sargent as CEO; Susan Winslow Leads Learning appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2020-09-17 15:16:05 UTC ]
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Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. His previous books include the poetry collections Middle Earth, Blackbird and Wolf, Touch, and Pierce the Skin, as well as a memoir, Orphic Paris. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-09-04 08:51:11 UTC ]
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