Allen Young
Brodsky in New York — Alexander Genis“We were the purest, perhaps the only Westerners.” That’s how Joseph Brodsky, who spent half of his life outside his homeland, described his youth.Russian-American writer Alexander Genis’s lavish evocation starts in Brodsky’s New York home, then turns from his teaching career to his physiognomy, his demeanor, and his mannerisms while working, lecturing,and reading. In describing this towering writer who defied description, even details of his daily life are imbued with aesthetic significanc.
An Urban Childhood around 1900 — Hu QingfangThis essay on the writing of Berlin Childhood around 1900 offers a new perspective on Walter Benjamin’s life — a distinctly urban perspective. Hu Qingfang takes readers back to the European metropolis of the late nineteenth century, when a new world was replacing the old and rapid changes in daily life were leaving their mark on the mindset and culture of the people.
Benjamin, a flâneur, grasped the essence of urban life, and that understanding is central to the books that brought him posthumous fame.
Living amid Decline — Xu ZhiyuanA heady atmosphere pervades Egypt today. In these traveler’s notes, Xu Zhiyuan steps out of the role of tourist and finds, between the beaten paths and well-trodden sites, an ancient civilization in decline, a struggling modern nation, and the remnants of a totalitarian past. After a brief conversation with Egyptian writer Alaa Al-Aswany, he reflects on the history and future of the country.
Venice Diary — Fu GeRomantic, melancholy, and mysterious, Venice inspires complicated feelings.In this essay, Fu Ge breaks away from the clichés of countless Venetian travelogues and displays an unusual verve and curiosity. The floating city, for him, can be summed up in two words: bleak happiness. Its bleakness stems from its shadowy history, its contradictory present, and its uncertain fate.
Huang Yingying: Let’s Talk about the Joy of Sex — Huang Yingying with Liu JingDisturbing words like harassment, assault, and violence dominate our discussions of sex, leaving us with a very limited vocabulary. In an era when sex is ostensibly viewed with openness and tolerance, we talk about it in increasingly uniform ways. Liu Jing’s conversation with Huang Yingying,dean of the Renmin University Institute of Sexuality and Gender, offers an important perspective: that actively talking about the joy of sex can be a way both to limit sexual violence and to create the sexual culture we want for the future.
Urbanization — Guo GuozhuUrbanization is photographer Guo Guozhu’s first-hand account of China’s development. Striving to convey what he sees in an objective, documentary fashion, he presents images of villages that have vanished as the country has urbanized. At the same time, he seeks a link to conflicts outside the frame:traditional settlement patterns based on kinship ties are locked in a historic struggle with a present dominated by industrialized, urbanized, globalized modernity.
Black Pool — Kuai LehaoKuai Lehao, who only recently began writing fiction, shows an astonishing knack for capturing the ephemeral moments of everyday life in lively, incisive prose. In this story, she turns her formidable descriptive power to sex and love among the elderly. The obstacles, allure, earnestness, and resignation that she chronicles are entirely absent from typical stories of young romance, yet the desire for love is universal.
C is for Cockroach / Civility Place — Julie KohKnown for her sharp, concise, eccentric prose, Julie Koh is the inaugural writer in One Way Street Magazine’s spotlight on Australia. In the first of these two deeply weird stories, the protagonist trains herself to become the wife of a cockroach, questioning her identity as human, white, and female. In the second, a towering high rise called “Civility Place” is the setting for a chilling display of hypocrisy and class warfare, where the law of the jungle prevails.
Roman Holiday — Xiao YuA family trip to Rome leads to moments of fright, tenderness, and romance that blur the lines between the present and the past. After moving overseas for his studies, Xiao Yu found that he’d developed complicated feelings about affection and solitude—feelings heightened by traveling with his parents and grandmother. He’d lost something he couldn’t put his finger on. Neither he nor his family seem to be in a hurry for another reunion, even though they have the opportunity.
On the Crutch of Frail Starlight — Ling YueLing Yue has an ability to find poetry wherever he looks: a city coat of arms,a landscape at noon, moonlight and the autumn sun. Here the most varied imagery finds its place, like notes arranged in a melody — now muted, now momentous — and abstractions such as love, time, and history emerge one after another, lightly held in the vessel of his verse.
Private — Li WeiThis work of criticism is so unusual in its perspective and so avant-garde in its form that it takes the reader a while to work out who it’s about. With a keen sense of rhythm, Li Wei slowly peels back all of Emily Dickinson’s secrets:her life, her personality, her love, and her pain — and most importantly, her poetry. Li’s originality and erudition are on full display as he conjures the artist’s brilliant, beguiling soul.
New Books around the World — Zheng Yushuang and Zeng QingruiSoybeans during the Republican era, Egypt after the Arab Spring, prison life in Iran, management consulting in China, Ian McEwan’s foray into science fiction: with topics and approaches that range from reportage to material culture and from economic history to literature set in the future, this issue’s New Books around the World pushes our perspectives to a new frontier.