Reporter | Xu Luqing
Edit | Yellow Moon
1 "White-Haired A'e and Others"
Sisi
Yilin Publishing House 2022-03
Now eighty years old, Sixi was once known as "the most childlike writer in the Chinese world": she took the pen name "Xixi", because the hieroglyph "Xi" resembled a little girl who jumped on the lattice; in her spare time, Sisi liked to draw, sew teddy bears, and make dollhouses, and she regarded sewing dolls as another form of writing; Xixi's brushstrokes were also naïve, Liang Wendao once commented that the most impressive thing in "My City" was the childish grammar, and the end of the novel was like the naïve "Goodbye!" of elementary school students! See you in the daytime! Good bye! See you in the meadows! "Very rustic and moving. In another of Xixi's novels, "Flying Felt", she seems to ride on a light flying carpet, skimming the weight of history, writing about how the people of Feitu Town make soda and how Cantonese folk songs should be sung, full of childlike curiosity in the initial world.
How does the "most childlike writer" write about old age? White-Haired A'e and The Others contains eight short stories written by Sisi over twenty years. In "White-Haired A'e", Sissi uses her seventy-year-old mother as a prototype to write about aging and life with a warm and humorous brushstroke. Ah E is once a rose girl, now a dusty old man, she loves to study the horse racing, love to write letters to her hometown, she goes out to wipe the wind and oil essence, to her friends' homes for fear of seeing people, in her own home and daughter-in-law to fight with her daughter-in-law. For the white-haired Ae, aging is as thrilling as growing up, and now she is taking clumsy steps towards the unknown future, just like when she came.
"Deliberate Thoughts"
Translated by Muriel Spark peng guiju
Aspire Nanjing University Publishing 2022-02
"I probably read too many Henry James's books at the time, and used 'beautifully' too much." "Fuck ordinary readers, there is no such thing as ordinary readers!" In Deliberate Thoughts, Muriel Sparker is witty about life in London in the 1950s and an attempt to explore what the art of fiction itself is. The protagonist, Freir Talbot, who is bent on becoming a writer, mistakenly fails to be hired as secretary of the Autobiographical Society, where she notices that some parts of her novel are beginning to become a reality, and Freire becomes increasingly suspicious that the convener of the Society, Sir Quentin, may be manipulating members of the Society. Fact and fiction are intertwined, and fiction and reality are indistinguishable. However, in the face of such crazy and bizarre events, sentimentality rarely appears, and funny ridicule is full of words.
Muriel Spark is a British female writer who has written more than twenty novels, including "I Want to Live", "Public Image", "Abbot of the Crewe Convent", "Mind Game" and so on. Among them, "Miss Brody's Youth" is rich in the characteristics of the feminist New Wave era, and was later adapted into a film by Fox in the United States, and was praised as "the best work depicting Edinburgh". In 2008, Muriel was named one of the "50 Great British Writers Since 1945", and her novel "Deliberate" was shortlisted for the Booker Prize after its publication in 1981.
Obituary
[English] Keith Korkhorn Ann Rowe, translated by Xu Longhua
Reading Library Nova Press 2022-01
In the 1930s, the template for modern obituary gradually took shape in the United States. Obituary often consists of a standard four-part structure: death announcement, biopathological information of the deceased, the condition of loved ones, and funeral information. Things changed after 9/11, with The New York Times issuing brief obituary for nearly 3,000 people killed on the day of the disaster. At the time, a reader said, "Everyone is considered a complete person." They experience funny stories, they make you cry and make you smile. It was a moment of gradual shift in obituary style, and people realized that even a short written biography had the power to bring life back to life.
These obituarys opened up a new form of remembrance, and gradually people stopped using vague words like "he died at home" or "she died suddenly," but instead talked frankly about how a loved one's addiction or clinical depression took their lives. U.S. criminal law lawyer Clarence Darrow once said, "I've never killed a person, but I've had the pleasure of reading a lot of obituaries." ”
The Economist excelled in the field of obituary writing, and apart from a thousand words in length, the genre had no writing limits. The Obituary is a collection of 201 life stories from 1995 to 2008 in The Economist's obituary, featuring celebrities such as Princess Diana, director Akira Kurosawa, and writer Saul Bellow, to lonely and unknown people, such as flea experts in the garden, and non-human reporting objects, such as an African grey parrot. Reading obituaries is about understanding the history of a field, an era, and opening the door to an individual's life—a short text that is not only a declaration of death, but also a celebration of life.
Immoral Politics: The Timeless Machiavellianism
[in] Ben-Amy Schalfstein by Rhyme Bamboo Translation
Sanhui Books, Nanjing University Press, 2022-03
Machiavellianism refers to the idea of "politics without morality" in the art of power, unlike the "ideal society" pursued by Plato and Aristotle. Machiavelli believed that pragmatism should be adopted as a guideline for seizing and maintaining power, using cruel power or rewards when necessary to maintain the status quo of rule.
Schalfstein, professor emeritus of the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University in Israel, found that Machiavellianism is a universal phenomenon in human political life, but does this necessarily mean that a better political life in the future is impossible? He examined the practice of amoral politics in different regions, comparing three ancient manifestations of Machiavellianism: the ancient Chinese jurists Shang Martin, Han Fei, and Lis, the ancient Indian Courtier, the Renaissance Italy Machiavelli and his friend Guicciardini. The author argues that the human moral tradition is insufficient to curb unethical and immoral political maneuvers and ruse, however, humanity can draw from past and present experiences of being ruled to identify and resist such tricks. Amoral Politics explains both how politics is often immoral, and discusses the relationship between morality and immorality among political leaders and ordinary people, and how far immoral authoritarian politics can go.
The Little Mandate of Heaven: Ancestral Shrines and the Politics of the Ming Dynasty
[Beauty] Shi Shanshan by Shao Changcai translated
Gravity Guangdong People's Publishing House 2022-02
Our general vision of the Ming Dynasty is that feudal despotism was highly reinforced, and the common people had no right to political participation and could only "absolutely submit" to the central government. However, a group of scholars who study the history of the Ming Dynasty have put forward different views, such as Lynn Struve once pointed out that there was a "rebellious spirit" in China at the end of the Ming Dynasty, which was manifested as slavery, anti-rent, strike, etc., and social mobility, philosophical movements, cheap books, and participatory religions during the Ming Dynasty contributed to the formation of the "rebellious spirit".
The book "Little Mandate of Heaven: Ancestral Temples and the Politics of the Ming Dynasty" also challenges people's single imagination of the Ming Dynasty's political system, and the author Shi Shanshan writes the political history of the Ming Dynasty from a bottom-up perspective, examining from a political perspective how the "rebellious spirit" surging in the Ming Dynasty was formed. She established the ancestral temple system as the object of study, and explored another set of political models in the soil of authoritarian centralization: through the ancestral temple, the people and officials, the local and the central government have room for maneuver and game. Magistrates were appointed by the emperor and their values were determined by the commoners, through which the commoners gained political discourse power, and the way the shrine system operated in this way provided an institutional focal point for the "rebellious spirit". Shi Shanshan believes that just as a person relies on "qi" to maintain health, this is the original vitality of a dynastic state, which has lasted for more than 240 years.
Not a Disgrace: Six Months After Pearl Harbor
[United States] by John Tolan translated by Liang Guoyu
Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House 2022-1
On a seemingly calm Sunday morning on December 7, 1941, several civilian planes languidly hovered over Pearl Harbor, without a single warship at sea. Eighteen aircraft have departed from the USS Enterprise and are expected to land on Ford Island within an hour. At 7:55, the first bomb fell, and the Pearl Harbor signal tower immediately called Kimmel Command. "Three minutes later, Rear Admiral Patrick Bellinger broadcast from Ford Island to the world: The airstrike on Pearl Harbor – not an exercise."
In Not a Disgrace: Six Months After Pearl Harbor, historian John Tolan gives a vivid account of pearl harbor and the subsequent history of the U.S.-Japan Pacific Theater. He interviewed generals and soldiers, using the oral accounts of witnesses as materials to restore the U.S.-Japan Pacific Theater from multiple angles. The book starts with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, talks about the Battle of Midway, focuses on the offensive and defensive battles between the United States and Japan in the Pacific Theater for half a year, and tries to answer the key question: What was the event that determined the Pearl Harbor attack? What happened to the Bataan Death March and why did it happen? How did Mac Arthur escape Corregiddo in the Philippines?
"I Like You Laugh"
[Argentina] Guillermo Modilo painted
United Reading Andron Beijing United Publishing Company 2022-01
Swallowing spinach in one bite and easily killing bad guys, Popeye is a childhood memory of generations around the world, and the popularity of cartoons has even made spinach sales rise in the United States. One of Argentina's most famous cartoonists of the 70s, Gilmore Modilo, was involved in the drawing of the comic. After Popeye, he continued his career in comics, drawing many dwarf characters with big noses and big eyes, and rarely adding text elements to the comics, but conveying all emotions with delicate pictures.
I Like You Laugh: All Three Volumes is a collection of works from Modilo's 60-year career. His cartoons are full of imagination, childish tones are a sharp satire on reality, painting themes covering serious issues such as technology, labor, animal rights, etc., and his humor is both clever and soothing: when you are tired, tear off the clouds as a quilt; when you are anxious, sit on the top of the city and graze sheep; when you don't want to go to work, you can "kill" an alarm clock. Modilo once said, "For me, humor is a kind of tenderness that helps people overcome their fears." ”
Field Manual of Chinese Birds (New Edition by Ma Jingneng)
Translated by John Ma Jingneng, Li Yifan
The Commercial Press 2022-01
In recent years, the number of "bird watching" enthusiasts in China has increased rapidly, and bird watching camps large and small have also been welcomed. In a statistic as of 2019, bird watching, which has been on the rise in the world for less than 300 years and in China for more than 20 years, has more than 110,000 people participating. China's geographical environment and species richness have inherent advantages in bird watching activities. The world's third-largest species, with more than 1,484 bird species recorded, is a rarity for a land mostly temperate.
The "Field Manual of Chinese Birds" launched by the Commercial Press this year is the latest revision of the 2000 edition, and once the manual was launched, it has become a bird identification tool often used by domestic bird watchers and researchers. The new edition splits the thick folio books that are inconvenient to use in the wild into two volumes, divided into pictures and texts, which are convenient for carrying around in the bird watching style. Editor Ma Jingneng increased the number of bird species included in the 1329 species 20 years ago to 1484, modifying the distribution area of birds with major changes. In addition to bird pictures and distribution maps, the book is accompanied by bird identification points and bird song audio, helping readers identify different birds by watching and listening in the wild.