Carrie and I are super excited that Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato will be coming out with McGill-Queen’s University Press in May 2020. (This is a book we love in which we respond to and reimagine Plato’s Symposium in a hybrid poetry/fiction format. You’ll find our own versions of the speeches of the text – of Phaedrus, of Aristophanes, of Diotima, etc – as inspired … Continue reading Uninvited now available for pre-order!
“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small), The Pidgin Warrior is a moving, hilarious novel set in 1930s Shanghai during wartime. Hull’s translation is a sensitive and humane rendering of characters that are by turns laughable and … Continue reading The Pidgin Warrior: An Interview
There’s a new storypost up at “Reading Notes: The Intertwining – The Chiasm”: this one is a translation of the first sentence of the Merleau-Ponty essay that forms the heart of this fiction/translation/exploration/reading project. You can find it by clicking on the red link in the text below! “If it is true that as soon as philosophy declares itself to be reflection or coincidence it prejudges what it … Continue reading all at once, pell-mell
A new post in the “Translating Recipes” series just went up on The Recipes Project. This one is a further exploration of the power of between-ness and Manchu medical recipes. It’s part 2 of 3, and you can check it out by heading over here. Continue reading Translating Recipes: Between, Pt. 2
Anna L. Tsing’s new book is on my new (as of this post) list of Must-Read-Books-That-All-Humans-Who-Can-Read-Should-Read-And-That-Nonhumans-Should-Find-A-Way-To-Somehow-Engage-Even-If-Reading-Is-Not-Their-Thing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015) joyfully bursts forth in a “riot of short chapters” that collectively open out into a mushroom-focused exploration of what Tsing refers to as a “third nature,” or “what manages to live despite … Continue reading The Mushroom at the End of the World: An Interview
Shellen Wu’s new book is a fascinating and timely contribution to the histories of China, science, technology, and the modern world. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 (Stanford University Press, 2015) brings readers into the nineteenth century industrialization of China, when coal became the “fuel of a ‘new’ imperialism.” Wu’s book asks how China came to matter in a new modern world … Continue reading Empires of Coal: An Interview
There’s a new storypost up at “Reading Notes: The Intertwining – The Chiasm”: this is the first in what will be a series of origin stories for color-constellations. Check out the new story by clicking the link (in red) embedded below for “with which it forms a constellation.” There you’ll find a link to the first constellation, “Bailey’s Moonburn.” “And, now that I have fixed it, if … Continue reading with which it forms a constellation
Michael Gibbs Hill’s new translation renders into English, for the first time, the introduction and overview to Wang Hui’s 4-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (Xiandai Zhongguo sixiangde xingqi, 2004). China from Empire to Nation-State (Harvard University Press, 2014) thus makes available to an English-reading audience a fascinating perspective on the history and historiography of modern China in the context of a larger global frame. Hill’s translation offers a view … Continue reading China from Empire to Nation-State: An Interview
Melek Ortabasi’s new book explores the work of Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), a writer, folk scholar, “eccentric, dominating crackpot,” “brilliant, versatile iconoclast” and much more. The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio (Harvard University Asia Center, 2014) expands how we understand and evaluate his work by contextualizing it in terms of translation studies, simultaneously informing how we think about (and with) translation. … Continue reading The Undiscovered Country: An Interview
Candis Callison’s timely and fascinating new book considers climate change as a form of life and articulates how journalists, scientists, religious groups, economic collectives, and others shape and influence public engagement around the issue. How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Duke University Press, 2014) looks carefully at the discourses and practices of five collectives within and through which climate change becomes meaningful: … Continue reading How Climate Change Comes to Matter: An Interview
