Look, just because it’s depressing doesn’t mean it isn’t also great. We bear that in mind as we discuss a truly great short story from the equally great Ding Ling, the writer of Miss Sophie’s Diary, another podcast post on the site. In it, a visiting writer takes stock of the way the Japanese invasion […]
The multi-volume Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian, is one of the masterworks of Chinese history and literature . Even today it is the only source for much of our information on pre-Han (206 B.C.E.) China. One of the classic stories from the collection is The Biography of Xiang Yu (《项羽本纪》). Lee and I […]
In this second of two podcasts on the Journey to the West, Lee discusses his work on a very strange, and very understudied, addendum to the original Journey to the West, written some time later. It turns the original’s focus inward, presenting multiple layers of reality. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Xi_You_Bu.mp3