Not sure how I missed the initial announcement of this, but Paper Republic and People’s Literature Magazine (wow, that website is something) have gotten together to put out Pathlight a downloadable magazine featuring “New Chinese Writing.”
The first issue is available for sale through Amazon.cn, but you can download either an epub or mobi file of issue number 2 for free.
Here’s the TOC from Issue 2:
Fiction
Wang Anyi: ‘Dark Alley’
Jia Pingwa: ‘The Hunter’
Medrol: ‘Contract with the Gods’
Mai Jia: ‘A Voice from the Beyond’
Ge Fei: ‘Mona Lisa’s Smile’
Zhou Daxin: ‘Golden Fields of Wheat’
Fang Fang: ‘Yan Wu’
Anni Baobei: ‘Qizhao: Lonely Island’
Lu Min: ‘Hidden Diseases’
Wei Wei: ‘George’s Book’
Guo Wenbin: ‘Blessings of Good Fortune’
A Yi: ‘Common People’
Poetry
Yu Jian: ‘Elephant’, ‘Hometown’, ‘Executing Saddam’, ‘Incident: Wind’, ‘The road I chose . . . still led to sunset and the trees’, ‘Terrorists’, ‘Unspeakable Fear and Longing’
Pan Wei: ‘Dingjiaqiao Village’, ‘Moonlight’
Tian He: ‘Going Home’, ‘Wet Nurse’, ‘Brothers Divide the Household’, ‘Tonight’s Moon’, ‘The Setting Sun’, ‘Earthenware’
Wang Xiaoni: ‘Moonlight is Extremely White’, ‘Thinking This, Then Thinking That’, ‘Those I Don’t Know I Don’t Want to Know’, ‘Early Morning’,‘Starting Anew as a Poet’
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The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Maybe I’ve been watching too much Doctor Who lately, and I’m therefore liable to see everything through science-fiction-colored glasses. But when the pages of The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira refer to “the totality of the present and of eternity”. . .