‘One morning, Salinger was woken from sleep by deafening noises. Dazed, he gazed outside the window and saw a row of gleaming Baekdu bulldozers, which had been modified from Chonma-ho battle tanks, bearing down on his cabin.’
In the forty ninth episode we continue our megacrossover, this time tackling modern literature. Once more unto the jazz hall, dear friends, once more, as we tackle: lamppost sexuality, mantou typography, disposable(?) wuxia, and the philosophy of chicken nuggets. No, really. I’m not joking. Wait, come back!!!
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// NEWS ITEMS //
- Taiwan Year at the Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing – Egoyan Zheng Excerpt
- Jeremy Tiang – The World Is Not Enough – is world literature just a ‘spice rack’ for lazy Westerners?
- Lost in Translation: What’s the Problem with Chinese Literature in the West? – Zoom talk w/ Jianan Qian, Nicky Harman, and Eric Abrahamsen
- Reading “The Story of the Stone” with 白先勇 Pai Hsien-Yung and 陳毓賢 Susan Chan Egan – a superstar Zoom talk!
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// PODCASTERS & THEIR CHOSEN STORIES //
Rob and Lee of The Chinese Literature Podcast chose Sealed Off by Eileen Chang
William and Kevin of Rereading the Stone chose Shanghai Foxtrot by Mu Shiying
Yifan of 文化土豆 Culture Potato chose A Bond Undone, Chapter 1 by Jin Yong
and your host Angus chose Salinger and the Koreans by Han Song
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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //
- Eileen Chang’s time in Shanghai and Hong Kong
- Distortion of time during lockdown
- Mu Shiying, a somewhat forgotten Shanghai modernist
- Modernism & ‘mechanophilia’
- Jin Yong & the origins of modern Wuxia
- Chinese pen names
- China’s Image in Han Song’s Science Fiction
- the concept of the ‘observer’ in quantum physics
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// Episode Sponsor //
Buy Jeremy Bai AKA Deathblade’s The Heretic Peacekeeper here:
Amazon: http://mybook.to/9h10eTHP
Kobo, Nook, etc: https://books2read.com/u/mgzxxx
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The Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast 