Latest news with #literature
South China Morning Post
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Discover Hong Kong's Wan Chai: free literature-theme tour opens for registration
Free literature-themed guided tours of Hong Kong's Wan Chai have opened for registration, offering 90 spots in August for participants to explore the district's historic buildings and hidden gems through the eyes of local writers. Advertisement Co-hosted by the Urban Renewal Authority (URA), the Museum of Hong Kong Literature and the Salvation Army in Hong Kong, the two-hour tour sessions are free of charge and led by Wan Chai residents. The URA said on Tuesday that there would be six tours, each accommodating 15 Hongkongers, next month, following its initial six tours held earlier this month, which saw more than 900 sign-ups. 'These tours draw inspiration from a selection of works that capture the scenes and stories of Wan Chai in the old days, reflecting another side of the neighbourhood,' said Yuki Yu Hwan-gung, the museum's operations and marketing director. 'Participants can also hear first-hand accounts from tour guides, who are local experts, to learn more about stories and developments in Wan Chai.' Advertisement A key highlight is Spring Garden Lane, depicted in the novel The Drunkard, authored by the late Liu Yichang in the 1960s.
New York Times
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Novel About a Friendship So Fierce, It Feels Like Worship
LONELY CROWDS, by Stephanie Wambugu In a novella collected in Gertrude Stein's 1909 book 'Three Lives,' Melanctha, a young biracial woman in a segregated American coastal town, yearns for the kind of knowledge and life experience that social norms (and her controlling father) forbid. At 16, she meets the older, sexually progressive, alcoholic Jane Harden, who teaches Melanctha everything she knows — including the power of worship itself. 'There was nothing good or bad in doing, feeling, thinking or in talking, that Jane spared her,' Stein writes. 'Sometimes the lesson came almost too strong for Melanctha, but somehow she always managed to endure it and so slowly, but always with increasing strength and feeling, Melanctha began to really understand.' Reading 'Three Lives' in an undergraduate literature seminar at Bard College, Ruth, the narrator of Stephanie Wambugu's extraordinary first novel, 'Lonely Crowds,' finds herself so moved that she slams the book shut and hurls it across her dorm room, shaking. 'I followed this character on her search for wisdom and felt I had actually taken part in her endeavors in the way dreaming of falling is like falling,' she says. 'I understood what it meant to sit at Jane's feet and how quickly those long hours spent kneeling at her feet must've passed because I understood devotion.' Devotion — unquestioning, self-sacrificing, one-sided, sublime — is the overwhelming concern of this bildungsroman about two best friends from suburban Rhode Island making their way into adulthood and the art scene in 1990s New York City. The object of Ruth's is Maria, the only other Black girl in their Catholic school class, whom she first encounters in line to purchase school uniforms. Ruth sees a woman and child turned away by the shopkeeper for insufficient funds, and the girls make eye contact as Maria is shuffled away, her 'wide black eyes' utterly 'without shame.' For the 9-year-old protagonist, the only child of working-class immigrants — her strict Kenyan mother works as a secretary in a doctor's office and her dejected, disillusioned father struggles to hold down a job — it's infatuation at first sight. Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book Let us help you choose your next book Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
RNZ News
a day ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Books: Author Catherine Robertson with her latest picks
We're going to talk about books, specifically what our critic Catherine Robertson calls her "to be read pile of shame" books, also known as those books you've bought and haven't yet got around to reading. Catherine reviews: The Royal Free by Carl Shuker (Te Herenga Waka University Press) The Mess of Our Lives by Mary-anne Scott (One Tree House) Three Wee Bookshops at the End of the World by Ruth Shaw (Allen and Unwin) Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The Independent
a day ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Hundreds of books removed from stores, libraries and universities in Afghanistan
Taliban supreme leader Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada has issued a directive ordering the removal of "deviant" books from all institutions across Afghanistan. A committee involving four Taliban ministries has been formed to review books and refer any "suspicious content" to clerics for further scrutiny. Hundreds of titles, including classic literature, historical works, and books on women's rights or secular governance, have already been pulled from circulation. The Taliban justify the ban by claiming these books are "against national interests," "anti-Islam," or aim to "mislead and corrupt society," conflicting with Islamic and traditional Afghan values. Publishers report that the censorship process is often arbitrary, leading to a collapse in the publishing industry and restrictions on book imports.
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart review – is this the future for America?
Gary Shteyngart is the observational standup of American letters, a puckish, playful Russian-born author who views the US through the eyes of an inquisitive tourist. The immigrant melting pot of New York is his stage; the intricate English language his prop. Shteyngart's characters, typically lightly veiled alter egos, are always getting lost, tripping up and mangling basic social interactions. It's the missed connections and short circuits that give his fictions their spark. Shteyngart's sixth novel is a lively, skittish Bildungsroman, shading towards darkness as it tracks the journey – literal, educational, emotional – of 10-year-old Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, an overanxious, over-watchful academic high achiever whose run of straight As has just been blighted by a B. 'Being smart is one of the few things I have to be proud of,' laments Vera, who diligently maintains a 'Things I Still Need to Know Diary' in which she makes note of difficult words and intriguing figures of speech. The girl is articulate and precocious, bent on self-improvement, and never mind the fact that she confuses 'facile' with 'futile' and 'hollowed' with 'hallowed' and is wont to wax lyrical about the 'she-she' districts of Manhattan. Her vocabulary is almost – but crucially not quite – sufficient to give us the whole story and explain what it means. Always happy to show his workings, Shteyngart cites Henry James's 1897 novel What Maisie Knew as the prompt for Vera, or Faith's child's-eye account of complicated adult affairs, although his gauche heroine bears a passing resemblance to the author himself as portrayed in his 2014 memoir, Little Failure. Friendless Vera lives with her rackety Russian-Jewish father, Igor (Shteyngart's name at birth), who edits a floundering liberal arts magazine, her harried Wasp stepmother, Anne (who added the 'e' in tribute to Anne Frank), and a boisterous younger half-brother, Dylan, who likes exposing himself to houseguests. But she also has (or possibly had) a Korean-born mother, long since vanished from the scene. Invisible Iris Choi plays the tale's white whale or MacGuffin; the elusive hidden figure that Vera is determined to locate. The eccentric Bradford-Shmulkins are lurching towards crisis, but they seem a model of stability when compared with the rest of the country, which reveals itself in unflattering flashes in the corners of the narrative. Shteyngart's novel, we come to realise, plays out a decade from now, in a 'post-democracy' USA where red state officials monitor menstrual cycles, self-driving cars shop their owners to the feds and the news platforms are abuzz with Russian disinformation. Desperate to redeem herself at school, Vera prepares to debate in support of the proposed 'Five-Three Amendment', a piece of racist legislation that would grant added voting weight to those 'exceptional Americans' whose ancestors arrived before the revolutionary war, 'but were exceptional enough not to arrive in chains'. In so doing, of course, she's arguing against her own interests. Blond, blue-eyed Dylan would count as an 'exceptional American'. Dark‑haired, brown-eyed Vera would not. Henry James provides the prompt but his involvement begins and ends there, because Vera, or Faith isn't Jamesian at all. The prose is simple, breezy and conversational, even when it's stumbling artfully over its words. If Shteyngart's novel possesses anything so fixed as a north star or a patron saint, it's surely not James but Vladimir Nabokov. The title references Ada, or Ardor, while its protagonist comes styled in the manner of a pint-sized Timofey Pnin: a dogged innocent caught between cultures and half-lost in translation. In the course of her adventures, Vera learns that she was named after Nabokov's wife, 'a woman who was a genius herself but in the olden days she had to serve her husband'. Vera Nabokov's 21st-century namesake – driven and decent and at the top of her class – similarly risks being dismissed as a second-class citizen. The novel is busy and ingratiating, almost to a fault, which is to say that it feels distracted, unsettled; a cultural code-switcher itself. Vera, or Faith was reputedly drafted at speed in a little under two months, incorporating elements from a spy novel that the author had recently abandoned. That accounts for its messy vitality and its frequent, perturbing shifts of gear. Shteyngart's ode to a good American in a bad America conspires to be, by turns, a rueful human comedy and a coming-of-age caper, a dystopian chiller and an espionage yarn. The colourful tale never satisfyingly hangs together; its component pieces tend to jar more than gel. But Shteyngart sets about his material with abundant energy and charm. He sketches a convincing caricature of a near-future USA and provides a stoical heroine that we can uncomplicatedly root for. Even in a degraded, compromised, up-is-down social climate, that has to be deserving of a solid B grade at least. Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart is published by Atlantic (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
