How does one quantify something as ephemeral as faith? We have become familiar with accounts of China which predicate their analysis on statistics—hard numbers seeming one of the few means of offering an objective view of the scale and complexity of the country. And certainly when it comes to faith in modern China the numbers are striking: 300 million people, or thereabouts, now consider themselves a follower of a faith of some kind—almost a quarter of the country.
Category Archive: News
Nicholas Gordon interviews Kishore Mahbubani, author of The ASEAN Miracle.
The Asian Review of Books is highlighting works of authors appearing at the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival later in the Spring. This list will be updated regularly as we get get closer to the festival opening, so bookmark this page and check back. Recent additions include an a new essay from Ece Temelkuran, an extract from Louder than Hearts, poetry by Zeina Hashem Beck, a review of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and a review of and excerpt from The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains by Choo Waihong.
When Fleurs de lettres approached me about interviewing Sarah Howe, winner of the 2015 TS Eliot-prize, I didn’t need to think twice about accepting the invitation. Before Howe won the prestigious award, I had already admired her work in the anthology Eight Hong Kong Poets (Chameleon Press, 2015) and a special issue of Law Text Culture (18:1, 2014). When her debut collection Loop of Jade came out I bought a copy right away and I appreciated all the more the care and thought she put into her work.
It can be hard to know what is going on in the Russian world of writing and books due to barriers of language; one only really knows what leaks for one reason or another into the English language press. In this regard, Chinese and Russian literature bear some similarities, at least from an English-language perspective looking in. Unfamiliar languages and undecipherable scripts leave both relatively inaccessible; English-speakers usually only view the worlds of Chinese and Russian literature through the tiny keyhole of a small number of not necessarily representative translations.
A visit to the Moscow International Book Fair pulls back the curtain at least a little.