Word: writers
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...ought to be in his element. The 55-year-old Chinese writer (Mo Yan is a pen name, Guan Moye his real one) is in his hometown of Gaomi, Shandong province, a place he has described as the wellspring of his creativity. It's also the location of most of his vivid, at times brilliant, novels. Local Communist Party officials are honoring the town's famous son with a lavish lunch, but as the dishes are served - three kinds of fish, oysters, sea cucumber - the author looks increasingly surprised. "I had no idea that Gaomi had a restaurant of such...
...Eric Abrahamsen, a Beijing-based translator of modern Chinese fiction, it is clear that Mo Yan engages in the complex calculus of what is and isn't permissible that faces every Chinese writer. There is nothing wrong with that: not every artist has the stomach for strident dissent and, having been banned in the past, Mo Yan has nothing to prove. But these days, says Abrahamsen, Mo Yan "knows exactly where the lines are and doesn't cross them." Discussion about the drawbacks of the one-child policy, and whether it should be rolled back, is now permissible in China...
...adamant that he never worries about censorship when choosing what to write about. "There are certain restrictions on writing in every country," he says, adding that the inability to attack some topics head on is actually an advantage. Such limitations make a writer "conform to the aesthetics of literature," Mo Yan argues. "One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety. A writer should bury his thoughts deep and convey them through the characters in his novel...
...right to bear arms seems to be the one altar where moderate Constitutionalists and armed zealots can worship comfortably side by side. "There's a real fear that once the Second Amendment is abridged, the First [guaranteeing free speech] will be the next to go," says Scott Wheeler, a writer for the U.S. Patriot Network. Despite the reverence for guns, however, "the vast majority of people in the militias are not violent or dangerous," says James Aho, a sociologist at Idaho State University who has interviewed 368 members of the radical right...
...took in $1.1 million on 181 screens. The Runaways, starring Dakota Fanning and Twilight's Kristen Stewart, is already DOA after two weeks. About as close as a non-Hollywood film can get to hit status is the $9.2 million cadged so far by Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, which has had great word of mouth from most of those who've seen it - but not nearly enough have seen it. (See the top 10 Pixar voices...