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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ISTANBUL HAS BEEN a hub for literary publishing since the late-19th-century Tanzimat era. But what does it mean to be a literary editor in Istanbul today? I sat down with Mustafa Çevikdoğan and Mehmet Erte to address this question, among others. Erte is the editor-in-chief of the oldest and... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-08-26 12:30:25 UTC ]
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Makenna Goodman on leaving New York publishing behind for the farms of Vermont, and why publishing her first novel was traumatic. Continue reading at The Paris Review
[ The Paris Review | 2020-08-20 17:18:24 UTC ]
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Interviews Richard van Leeuwen is a senior lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Amsterdam. This year, he won the 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Arabic Culture in Other Languages category for his book The Thousand and One Nights and... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-08-10 20:32:46 UTC ]
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NATASHA TRETHEWEY’S Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir is a breakthrough book that artfully balances prose and lyricism as it guides us through unspeakable trauma. Prior to our conversation, I felt a bond with Natasha since I spent much of my youth “as the girl whose brother committed suicide.”... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-07-28 12:30:40 UTC ]
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A look at how people have engaged with “Huck Finn” and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” over time offers a snapshot of who we were and are. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2020-07-03 10:00:00 UTC ]
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NEAL POLLACK, known to his fans as “The Greatest Living American Writer,” has had many incarnations in his literary life, from novelist to mystery writer to prolific memoirist. First, in his 2008 memoir Alternadad, Pollack reflects on his recent fatherhood and its incompatibility with his grumpy... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-06-28 15:00:57 UTC ]
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Banner image by Jazzy Harvey. ¤ ONE OF MY FAVORITE statements about Los Angeles, something that really captures its ethos, comes from Cameron Esposito in an article she provided for The A.V. Club. Esposito remarks on “how logical a backbone [L.A.] provides to completely illogical pursuits.” It’s... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-06-25 17:00:38 UTC ]
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Long-held assumptions held by the trade about writers of colour must be challenged and a concerted effort made to reach new and diverse audiences, the industry heard tuning into a webinar launching the Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing report. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-06-23 18:37:47 UTC ]
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Interviews Veronica Esposito Photo by Camila Valdés Megan McDowell has translated many contemporary authors from Latin America and Spain, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, and Lina Meruane. Shortlisted for the Man Booker... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-06-22 15:20:00 UTC ]
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GIVEN THE LONG TRADITION of memoirs written by men of a certain age and stature looking back on their life and accomplishments, the surge in memoirs by women in recent years has been quite a breakthrough. What We Carry, the new memoir by Maya Shanbhag Lang, is nothing short of radical, not just... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-06-21 12:30:36 UTC ]
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Every Monday through Friday, AudioFile’s editors recommend the best in audiobook listening. We keep our daily episodes short and sweet, with audiobook clips to give you a sample of our featured listens. Host Michele Cobb speaks with narrator Julia Whelan, one of AudioFile’s 2020 Golden Voices,... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-06-08 09:15:30 UTC ]
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Interviews Andrea Bryant Published by Cornell University Press in 2019 and awarded the 2019 American Association for Italian Studies Book Prize (20th and21st Centuries), Stephanie Malia Hom’s Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-05-26 12:48:05 UTC ]
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A COOKBOOK IS a kind of invitation to its author’s table. So it is with Irina Georgescu’s book Carpathia: Food from the Heart of Romania, which draws overdue attention to the food of her native country. Of course, the culinary world is crowded and chaotic at the best of times. Turmoil such as it... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-05-23 17:00:06 UTC ]
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Interviews Veronica Esposito Emma Ramadan is a literary translator based in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is the co-owner of Riffraff, a bookstore and bar. She is the recipient of an NEA Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim grant, and a Fulbright... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2020-05-18 18:20:27 UTC ]
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Macmillan Learning general manager Susan Winslow explains how the textbook publishers of yesterday are transforming into cutting-edge digital platforms focused on student success, and what the Covid-19 crisis is revealing about the future of learning. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-05-14 04:00:00 UTC ]
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A couple’s long idyllic life together comes under scrutiny in the author's latest novel. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2020-05-08 04:00:00 UTC ]
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IT IS ONLY IN the second half of Ellen O’Connell Whittet’s poignant and exquisite memoir about ballet (and other causes of female pain), What You Become in Flight, that it dawns on the reader — or on this reader, at least — that she’s invoking the word “flight” in two senses: the balletic sense... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books
[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-05-07 17:00:08 UTC ]
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On this episode of Rekindled, award-winning author Vanessa Hua talks with Amy Meyerson about her new book, The Imperfects, a story about a priceless inheritance that leads one family on a life-altering pursuit of the truth. Meyerson talks about the process of researching for her new novel, using... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-05-06 20:00:35 UTC ]
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