from Nine Buildings

Yao Nan said, every year we come to grave-sweeping time, and only then does it feel like spring. He could never understand why we’d wait for springtime, when flowers… More

On Translating Zou Jingzhi

‘Nine Buildings’ works through what he [Zou] witnessed and suffered as a child and young man, all the while retaining his customary spare, elegant prose and detached vision. More

Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni

The night of the typhoon, the sky was full, the world destroyed. // From west to east, herds of black cattle rolled on their heads / the wind’s hoofs… More

On Translating Wang Xiaoni

The Chinese social and interpersonal landscape has been changing at breakneck speed for the last thirty years, and as witness to these seismic shifts, Wang Xiaoni consistently adopts an… More

On Translating Li Shangyin

To read Li Shangyin’s poetry is to be beautifully disoriented. It is to encounter a unique lyricism comprised of layer upon layer of mythological, historical, and symbolist imagery all… More

Beauty is a Wound

[U]pon her departure, the nineteen other girls followed her into her room, gathered on top of her bed, and resumed their conversation about how to amputate a Japanese soldier’s… More