Censoring nosebleeds in a post-Fukushima manga
Oishinbo (“The Gourmet”), a manga about a journalist and his partner touring Japan gathering ingredients for the ultimate meal, was suspended last month for depicting its characters in the latest chapter… Read more »
Illustrating the dystopian trippiness of Akira
BFI Film Classics is a series of criticism published by the British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan to “introduce, interpret, and celebrate landmark films of world cinema.” Nine new books are due out in October to… Read more »
Hail & Farewell: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
There is a bookstore in Cartagena, Colombia, called Ábaco Libros y Café. Along a wall lined with wine near the entrance is a collage of black-and-white photographs of all the writers who’ve… Read more »
Peter and Jane and Miriam and Penguin take on art, copyright, crucifixes, and dead rabbits
Peter and Jane are brother and sister. Miriam and Ezra are sister and brother. Peter and Jane’s mother loves art. Miriam and Ezra make art. Peter and Jane learn about… Read more »
Coming home to the red lanterns of Zhang Yimou and Gong Li: A conversation with Teju Cole
Yan Geling’s The Criminal Lu Yanshi, a novel about an intellectual in exile who gets sent to a labor camp upon his return home, was published in 2011. Though it… Read more »
Tarkovsky’s Forever Fond Farewell
In 2012, while browsing through Eslite, Taipei’s twenty-four-hour bookstore, I found a book that would help me understand how to sit through an Andrei Tarkovsky film. It is called Bright, Bright… Read more »
Tibetan literature: a library in exile
A treasure trove of Tibetan literature has left its temporary home in New York for Asia. Instead of ending up in Lhasa, however, the collection of original wood blocks and… Read more »
“Elementarno, my dear Watson”
Supplementing my fascination with the canine, hotel, and bobsledding shenanigans in Sochi and of Pussy Riot’s Brooklyn appearance, I’ve been dipping into two Russian Sherlock Holmes small-screen adaptations, as well as… Read more »
Binyavanga Wainaina on coming out, homophobia, and the powers of the imagination
“I cannot say the word gay until I am thirty-nine.” In 2002, the Kenyan intellectual, writer, and satirist Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize for African Writing for the short story “Discovering Home”… Read more »
To be and not to have been: kill lists and poetry
When a writer or a translator strips a well-known work down to its essence, as Alice Oswald had done with The Iliad in Memorial, the narrative takes on almost new meaning. In… Read more »