TSLR Issue 1 - Coming Soon

Dear Readers,

This is Ryan, the poetry editor, writing to you tonight to give you a quick update to what has been going on lately at the Shanghai Literary Review.

Our first publication is going to be coming out on July 1st, and I think all of us at the Review are super excited about its release. When I look through the work selected, I know that our inaugural issue will always be something special.

We have writers from around the world bringing up issues both large and small, and when I read over these pieces I learn things about Shanghai, but there are lessons from around the world as well. What a bookstore means to someone without access to books. What life in a small Indian village feels like. What tragedy looks like from the other side of the world. These perspectives display the power of writing at its best, and I think their voices have stories that reach out to everyone.

As always, though, we are accepting new work, so I would encourage you to submit if you are considering doing so. There's no fee to submit, and we are always happy to see new voices in the stack.

For now, we are just coming off of The Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday dedicated to the poet Qu Yuan. He drowned himself in a local river, but the local people rushed out in their boats to recover the body. When they couldn't find him, the threw rice balls into the river to keep the fish from eating the body. The boat races continue today, a moment each year that celebrates the close connection a people can have with their poetry.

Cultural Confluence

Hi. New York again. Guess what's playing at BAMcinématek this week? In celebration of the Twin Peaks revival that just debuted on Showtime, Brooklyn's favorite art house movie theater is showcasing some other works by the actors and actresses from David Lynch's iconic '90s TV show. I'm super hyped to see Red Rose, White Rose on the big screen.

This Chinese language romantic drama from 1994 features Winston Chow, most recognizable to Western audiences from his starring roles in Ang Lee's early international hits (The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman), and Joan Chen, Josie Packard of the Lynchian canon, or Little Flower if you knew her from the beginning as a Chinese propaganda film actress in the 1970s.

Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar-wai's sassy, brassy cinematographic co-conspirator, provides the lush visuals, while Stanley Kwan, whose film Centre Stage (1992) quite possibly rescued Maggie Cheung from the purgatory of the ingénue, directs the ensemble cast in beautiful period costumes. Kwan, incidentally, is now in pre-production for a biopic on the late writer Sanmao, whose book I'm currently translating.

And, well, the whole thing is based off a novella by the illustrious Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang, set in the pre-Communist society she knew so well. What a dense text! What a dense life! It almost makes me want to go back to grad school. Almost.

Shanghai Saturday Night

During our previous Open Mic last Saturday night, May 6, we asked guests to contribute lines to a collaborative poem. The theme was "Shanghai, Saturday Night."

We picked and plucked and rearranged 1 or 2 lines each. Here we present our original collaborative monstrosity. :)

With lines contributed by: Joe Douglas, GAGA, Brad Good, Genevieve Flaven, Manman, Marella, Anna Molir, Garr Ottorsen, Jesse Rapoport, Daryl Star, Angus Stewart, Stone, 朽葱, & anonymous writers.

Thanks everyone for coming out and for participating in our third monthly open mic night. See photos of the evening on our Facebook page.

Shanghai, Saturday Night

As it begins

I listen to the radio a bit

interjected with verse and laughter

The city lights vanishing

from a distant lane house

I go nowhere I see nobody

a flaneur am I, wandering alone

I will rule, till I forget

A temple where I don’t want to be

A jungle of color and rhyme surrounds:

Donut, eggplant,

Street rats, expats

High heels, dogs, brick

Spicy food, heart attack

The city is a carnival,

a party, the masked passengers like

a separated piece of soul

I assume that I am step by step with

the lady of the night

A comedy that you know is going

to end, as it begins

Despair, you’re not to do anything permanent

Some years ago, the idea of being away

From the night with much more love

Despair in a mother-place remembered

“Point, and line, to plane,” Kandinsky whispered

notes of color in my ear

Familiar with that missing part of life,

Get me a whisky sour,

1 more, 4 more

Russians snorting cocaine

3 beautiful young Chinese

4am with strangers

Follow you out

Directly under that street

Tranquility of unknown

Excitement of known

文字的苍茫

Poisoned fog coughing sobs

When was the last time I saw the stars?

Saturday Night w. TSLR

TSLR will be changing locations for our third open mic & reading, Saturday, May 6, 7:00pm. We're excited to be hosting the event at My Place Ruin Bar, located at 1788 Xinzha Lu, 3F. 

This month, we're featuring several of the local authors who will be published in the forthcoming TSLR Issue 1.

Bring your best poetry, translations, stories, and essays, and sign up to read to a supportive crowd of fellow writers and art lovers. Or just come to listen and relax with new friends. The rooftop bar serves drinks and food.

Come at 7:00pm to sign up for a reading slot, or email shanghailiterary@gmail.com to pre-reserve a slot. Please limit readings to 5 minutes, including introductory remarks. Original work only please.

A Mind as Large as the Universe

Friends and lovers,

This is Mike, your New York-based translation editor, sending springtime greetings and a literary dispatch from across the globe. Gotham’s seasonal change is lilting along in fits and starts. How quickly a weekend of resplendent sunshine gives way to the drab and cold, the gloom and rain. But, regardless of weather, the city percolates with activity as millions of souls revive from the spiritual stupor of the winter months. While I haven’t had the fortune to participate in your Shanghai events (yet), I write with renewed fervor in the afterglow of meeting a most distinguished literary forebear: Maxine.

Yes, none other than the Maxine, that is, Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior in the flesh, as it were. Last week I attended talks and celebrations two nights in a row to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Maxine’s seminal book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Hosted at NYU, the first night featured a packed audience in Cooper Square, with panelists Hua Hsu, Jenny Zhang, Jess Row, and Pacharee Sudhinaraset, as well as a cake in the likeness of her first edition book cover.

The following night, at Verso Books’ headquarters on the other side of the East River, Maxine presided over another crowded roomful of devotees while fielding questions from novelist Monique Truong. Both events were cosponsored by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, an arts nonprofit and community organization of critical importance, along with a bevy of other academic and publishing outfits.

Not a bad office view from Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.

Maxine was a vision in flowing white hair, dominating each space with her boldly pacifist ethos and continued refusal, many decades out, to cave to convention. But what stood out most to me was the immense empathy and charm that radiated from her, a woman whose monumental influence in the canon of contemporary American literature seemed at odds with the tiny soft-spoken figure before us. Between anecdotes about getting arrested at an antiwar protest and thrown in a cell with Alice Walker and leading writing workshops for veterans to help them negotiate past trauma, her sincerity and sly candor beguiled us all.

I’m so tickled that I had the chance to not only hear the Notorious M.H.K. speak, but also get my books signed and chat with her in person. And if, for whatever reason, you’re among the few who have not come across her work in a literature class, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of The Woman Warrior posthaste. I imagine you’ll be glad, like me, to enjoy her writing entirely divorced from a scholarly/academic context. Is it fiction? Is it memoir? Who cares! Womanhood, language, history, and memory intertwine in a dazzling narrative that shuttles the reader back and forth between a mythic past and a present that might be just as illusory and unstable. Maxine’s still got it, after all these years.

Mike & Maxine in twenty-seventeen!