All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Midnight in Peking is available in the USA and Canada from April 24th, but you can pre-order with a discount before then via amazon.com….
This month’s Time Out Beijing has a list of books on old Beijing worth reading that ChinaRhyming readers might like to check out….click here.
From the days when really, really good beer came from Tsingtau (Qingdao) – about 1940….
RAS LECTURE
Tuesday 20th March 2012 at 7:00 p.m.
Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road, Shanghai
兴国宾馆上海市兴国路78å·
ALICE XIN LIU AND ERIC ABRAHAMSEN
On
The Oldest Magazine In China Gets A Makeover
Chinese literature has never had the kind of international appeal that writing from other Asian countries has garnered around the world. However, one of China’s oldest literary magazines, People’s Literature (人民文å¦), has brought out an English edition with a focus on the world market. Associated with Paper Republic, the website devoted to Chinese literature translated into English, the editors of Chinese People’s Literature have brought out Pathlight.
Alice Xin Liu (English managing editor) and Eric Abrahamsen, the founder of Paper Republic, will talk about setting up the magazine – the challenges, inspirations and where it will go from here. They’ll be discussing the two issues with very different aims; the first features the Mao Dun Literature Prize and the second is aimed at the London Book Fair, where China will be a guest in 2012.
Eric Abrahamsen is a translator and publishing consultant who has lived in China since 2001. He is a co-founder and manager of Paper Republic, and the recipient of translation grants from PEN and the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent translation is Wang Xiaofang’s Notes of a Civil Servant, to be published by Penguin in 2012.
Alice Xin Liu was born in Beijing but left for London at the age of seven, returning when she was 21. She is a graduate of English Literature from Durham University in the UK, but her Chinese cadre grandparents were the main force behind her real education. Now, still an enthusiastic reader of Chinese, Japanese and English fiction and poetry (especially the work of Haruki Murakami), she has translated poems by Sen Zi for the Copper Canyon Press/NEA Chinese poetry anthology Push Open the Window. She is now working on The Letters of Shen Congwen for a Chinese publishing house, and is the English managing editor of Pathlight: New Chinese Writing.
Entrance: RMB 30.00 (RAS members) and RMB 80.00 (non-members). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
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I’ve visited the new and vast (though don’t confuse volume with value here please) National Museum of China several times – each trip is more bizarre than the last. An exhibition of awful socialist realist Mao portraits followed by an even more awful exhibition dedicated to how much the Chinese police love the Chinese people (a love that may not be all that returned!) featuring kitschy paintings of cops helping old ladies across roads and cradling children in their laps. Then there’s the special exhibitions – the first time I went it was a Louis Vuitton exhibition, then a Bulgari show…..
Anyway, Matthew Niederhauser has been taking some photos and making some comments about the weirdness of the place here in Selling Out History: China’s National Museum of Luxury.
A quick post to say I’ll be on a panel this Monday evening at the Beijing International Literary Festival talking crime in a session wonderfully called “Underbelly”.
Monday, 19th March – The Beijing Bookworm – 18:00
Are drug-addicts, murderers and duplicitous gangsters misunderstood misfits with hearts of gold or low-life scum? Three writers – Paul French (UK), Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (Iceland) and Chris Womersley (Australia) – delve into the underbelly to investigate those who live outside the law on the fringes of society. Join us to find out if there is a criminal code or if there really is no honour among thieves. Moderated by crime writer Catherine Sampson.