Tag: China

Caught Mapping

The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.

Underground Distractions, Shanghai

This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery.   Windows on trains and planes are equipped with shades: vertical or horizontal ...

The Met Goes to China

In July, while in New York, I toured the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s much buzzed about “China: Through the Looking Glass,” a visually stunning multimedia exhibit that showcases the varied ways that ...

Famine Fiction

Betraying friends. Trading sex for food. Devouring human flesh. All of these occurred during the famine that followed China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), and all of them ...

China at World’s End

In a galaxy far away, but close enough, an intelligent alien civilization finally realizes that its planet orbits around three suns instead of one. They face the classic three-body problem of ...

Otherworlds

In the history of modern comics—as in the history of comic’s cousin, film—there have long been two competing impulses. Film history contrasts the styles of two pioneers: the documentary realism of ...

Who is General T?

  By now the March 30, 2005 Powerball drawing seems to have taken on the workings of a tall tale: In a pot nearing $14 million, Powerball officials usually expect four to five second-place ...

Mo Yan through a Dog’s Eyes

Mo Yan, born Guan Moye, is widely regarded as one of contemporary China’s most talented and accomplished authors. Predictably, his receipt of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature has brought him an ...

China, Middlebrow to Highbrow

Fiction has more than one way of distancing itself from the real. In most cases this distance serves as a prelude to a future homecoming. The story, like some interstellar traveler, flings itself ...