Yan’s insightful essays show how attempts to control history and society can be countered by memory and imagination.
An acclaimed Chinese author discusses censorship, artistic independence, and the importance of good writing.
Yan Lianke (b. 1958), one of China’s most prolific and imaginative authors, has won global praise for his novels and stories. He is also an outstanding essayist, as this collection—which “arose out of a series of lectures that the author gave during a trip to North America in the spring of 2014”—amply demonstrates. Much of Yan’s fiction has a labyrinthine strangeness to it; in fact, one of the most interesting pieces here is his acceptance speech for the 2014 Franz Kafka Prize. This tone and approach give him the latitude to be critical of government policies without being direct or strident, although much of his output has been censored anyway (he is often described as China’s most censored author). In several of the essays, Yan examines the Chinese government’s suppression of discussion about social traumas and policy failures in favor of relentlessly positive news. The result is a sort of enforced amnesia, and the author notes that the younger generation has little knowledge of the country’s real history. Despite his great concerns and the recurring themes of his novels, he does not like to be seen as an overtly political writer. His desire, he writes, is to produce novels and stories that are well written and meaningful. Despite the age of these pieces, they seem remarkably fresh, timely and relevant, and the texts serve as a solid introduction to Yan’s fiction, as well as a clear-minded commentary on Chinese society and the place of literature within it. The volume includes an introduction by translator Rojas, who has worked with Yan for many years.
Yan’s insightful essays show how attempts to control history and society can be countered by memory and imagination.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781478030393
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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