Mo Yan on Marxism

What Marx wrote in the "The Communist Manifesto" was of great beauty. However, it seems to be very hard to make that dream come true. But then again, I look at those European, specifically Northern European, states and societies and wonder: Would these welfare states even be thinkable without Marx? We used to say in China that in a way Marxism has saved capitalism. Because those who benefited most from his ideology seem to be societies in the West. We Chinese, Russians and Eastern Europeans seem to have misunderstood Marxism.

Related
Mo Yan according to his translator

Deborah Eisenberg interview

I write down some little thing, and then eventually something comes out of that, or doesn’t. I’m just trying to get down one accurate sentence and then another accurate sentence. And most of my time is spent rearranging the little counters in the sentence. And then the little counters on the page, and then the little counters in the whole.

Is Philip Roth the greatest living American novelist?

 Roth was never just a novelist to readers but an iconoclast and narcissist, a Jewish cultural hero (villain to some), a (probable) misogynist, a literary celebrity who folded his own life into novels like they were tabloids (or metafictions?) and, after Toni Morrison, our great American hope.

But is he the greatest living American novelist?

Finnegans Wake a bestseller in China!

A Chinese writer friend attributes the good sales of Finnegans Wake to media hype and unusual advertisements, which is at least partly true. Xinhua net reports that large outdoor billboards for the book have appeared in eight major Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chongqing. Deploying such billboards for a book is itself unusual. Shanghai’s DF Daily notes that the book’s first print run of 8,000 copies was sold out in three weeks under “intensive marketing.” A Shanghai resident commented on Sina weibo that she passes by a billboard for the book every day and it makes her “really want to challenge the high difficulties; but what if I can’t understand?” This reminds me of another comment I saw — at an online bookstore website — from a young woman who purchased One Hundred Years of Solitude: “I simply wanted to know why this book was selling so well.” She found the book hard to understand but “felt different after careful savoring.” 

George Saunders on his writing process

 For me, that process of taking a first draft and working with it over a period of months is EVERYTHING. That’s where a person finds out what he really means and (you could argue) who he really IS. So I suppose one danger is that we might get the idea that, you know, “to blurt, is to be.” The idea that whatever comes out is good and is us. Whereas someone who has really worked with text realizes - well, that neither one is “really” you, but that the considered version might represent a “higher” you - brighter, less willing to coast or condescend, funnier, and (mysteriously) also, I think, kinder.

Related
A conversation between George Saunders and his editor

Jerry Pinto bags The Hindu Literary Prize 2012

Journalist-author Jerry Pinto has bagged The Hindu Literary Prize 2012 for his novel Em and the Big Hoom.
I've not yet read any fiction by Jerry Pinto. But I have read his witty and hilarious columns, specially in the Statesman. He's a superb prose writer.

Haruki Murakami has a new novel in April | Believing in Fiction

New Murakami Novel
Literary giant Haruki Murakami is set to release his first novel in three years in April, publisher Bungeishunju Ltd. said.

Believing in Fiction
I have moments when my faith in fiction falters and thencomes to the edge of collapse. I find myself asking, “Am I really a believer?” And then, “Was I ever?” First to go are the disjointed, upended narratives of experimental fiction. Oh well ... Next, the virgin birth miracle of magical realism. But I was always Low Church on that one. It’s when the icy waters of skepticism start to rise round the skirts of realism herself that I know my long night has begun. All meaning has drained from the enterprise. Novels? I don’t know how or where to suspend my disbelief. What imaginary Henry said or did to nonexistent Sue, and Henry’s lonely childhood, his war, his divorce, his ecstasy and struggle with the truth and how he’s a mirror to the age—I don’t believe a word: not the rusty device of pretending that the weather has something to do with Henry’s mood, not the rusty device of pretending.

Confessions of a translator

As I was approaching 40, not an easy milestone for anybody, I suddenly realized that I had lost the urge to translate. It had become a routine, and that had always been my idea of a senseless existence – when life becomes routine.

The Tarantino of Russian literature | Asia's obsession with graphic novels

Vladimir Sorokin,
Many people don’tlike Sorokin, sometimes they hate him and more often than not they don’tunderstand him, mistaking the views of characters for the author’s own. 

Asia and Graphic novels

Printed graphic storytelling is an extension of all that has been performed for centuries across Asia, whether translating the ancient Mahabharata from verse and stage to the illustrated page in India, Cambodia and Nepal, in China’s Shuihu Zhuan (Outlaws of the Marsh or The Water Margin) moved from verse to scrolls to comics, Osamu Tezuka’s reaction to his war experiences in the hugely popular tales of Astro Boy, or Shaun Tan’s stunning The Arrival. These are seen as being as legitimate and masterful as novels solely of the written word because in Asia, and particularly where symbols are used rather than alphabet, the image is also the word and carries perhaps more potency and power than any arrangement of letters.

Is the novel's time up?

“No one really knows what’s coming, what new economic models will exist, whether there will be a market,”

Lars Iyer interview

Both my manifesto and my novels are intended to foreground the difficulty of maintaining such a link between past and present, between neoliberal capitalism and European Modernism. For me, neoliberalism has deprived us of the conditions under which a certain literature – the literature, in particular, of Modernism – thrived. The vanguards have disappeared because there is no one in particular to offend. Literary fiction lives on, but it has become, for the most part, a kind of kitsch, depending on the most schematic ways of presenting character, plot, etc. – on a ‘realism’, a standardised system of representation, that is completely at one with the generic models of taste on which advertising and marketing depend.

It takes years to become a writer: Cheryl Strayed

Grace Paley said that she would write so she could taste life twice – she’d have the experience and then relive it in writing. I think that that’s true for me, too.
I couldn’t have written this book at 26. I wasn’t yet the writer who wrote Wild. It takes years to become a writer. I had to throw myself into that experience and then I had to grow up to understand what it meant.

Yan Lianke interview

I understand the Chinese political and cultural environment well. I understand people who don't use their voice. As an intellectual and author I should require myself to do it first. If I don't do enough, I can't require other authors to do so. There's always a reason. There's always one book or another; timing. But I think as an author I could have taken more responsibility and I didn't.

           Yan Lianke is one of the  Man Booker International Prize 2013 finalists. 

Howard Jacobson quote

 In Jaipur, I saw a future for the book. 

In support of Salman Rushdie

The literary and film community today came out in support of controversial author Salman Rushdie and blamed the West Bengal government for cancellation of his visit to the metropolis. 

My apology to Salman Rushdie. Kolkata is my city and I'm ashamed you were refused permission to visit it.The fact is Kolkata has long been stripped of its cultural and intellectual identity, and is now  totally messed up with politics(capital P). How strange that the powers-that-be have no problem with Amitav Ghosh, but they see red in whatever you do, say and write without having any sense or vision of a real writer. Sorry Salman, and my apology to you once again on behalf of the city which was once the cultural capital of India..