‘I wrote the asinine words ‘liquor is literature’ and ‘people who are strangers to liquor are incapable of talking about literature’ when I was good and drunk, and you must not take them to heart.’
In the ninety ninth episode of the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast we’re taking a lengthy holiday with Mo Yan in The Republic of Wine, so get your visa stamped and your baijiu in hand. This time there are two discussions. First, sober, with returnees Dylan Levi King and Michelle Deeter. Then, drunk with DLK and poet/translator Martin Winter. Listen all the way through, comrade, to hear two of us curse then proclaim our love for a prominent figure in the field. This is the penultimate episode; the time for tomfoolery is almost over.
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// NEWS ITEMS //
- Tongueless by Lau Yee-wa, an HK thriller on Canto/Mandarin tensions
- Helen Wang interviews Sabina Knight, we have no choice but to stan
- Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi to be published by New York Review of Books
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// WORD OF THE DAY //
(酒量 – jiǔliàng – capacity for liquor)
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// MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE //
- Faces in the Crowd – Feng Jicai
- Rickshaw Boy – Lao She
- A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James
- The Acid House – Irving Welsh
- The Samurai – Julia Kristeva
- The Diary of a Madman – Lu Xun
- Lapvona – Ottessa Moshfegh // (she’s also written autofiction set in Yunnan, Xinjiang, and Jiangsu)
- Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out & Japanese govt’s Sake Viva! drive
- Pizzles & Chinese genital dishes
- Academic article: Cannibalism in Joyce and Mo Yan
- Academic book: Postsocialism and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century
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