Word: totemic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Penguin paid $100,000 for the English-language rights to Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem, a coming-of-age tale set in Inner Mongolia. It was a record sum for a Chinese novel. In 2008, the same publishing house issued, amid much brouhaha, Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars, a lively look at the dark side of China's boom. And it has just announced plans to bring more Chinese writers to the attention of international readers by expanding its Beijing operations...
...whose stories stayed in print and whose essays remained in textbooks. That special status has also meant that the work of virtually all current Chinese authors owes a debt of some kind to the stories in the Penguin collection. Jiang Rong readily admits, for example, that Wolf Totem was inspired in part by Lu Xun's writings. And though Zhu Wen denies this kind of link, Lovell, who has translated both writers, argues persuasively that in Zhu's stories of 1990s China we see an "obsession with a heartlessly congested society that seems to have trickled directly down from...
...means, immerse yourself in Wolf Totem (if you don't mind slow-paced tales), I Love Dollars (no caveat there, it's a rollicking read) and other contemporary Chinese works in translation. But if you want to get the most out of them, you'll need to know about The Real Story of Ah-Q. In fact, there's only one thing missing from the collection, and that's a sticker on the front proclaiming READ ME FIRST...
...Department of Culture could hire administrative staffers and full-time workers in addition to putting the unemployed of the arts sector back on their feet and working for a common purpose. Some might argue that financing artists should be low on our priority totem pole. But artists are taxpayers, rent-payers, and consumers—just like everyone else. This country has 100,000 nonprofit arts groups, which employ some six million people and contribute $167 billion to the economy per year. Of course, in the long term we could use more engineers and science teachers, but right...
...refugee from the Turkish campaign of atrocities against Armenians. One year earlier, his mother had died of starvation in his arms. In adulthood, from 1926 to 1942, he obsessively reworked two haunting double portraits that showed them side by side - he the tentative 10-year-old; she an impassive totem, forever out of reach beneath waves of nostalgia...