Page 2 - Simon Leys News Today

One recent weekend, I went for a walk through the alleys around the Qianmen shopping district, once Beijing’s commercial heart and still home to nationally known traditional shops. One of its chief side streets, Dazhalan, had been turned into a Ye Olde Pekinge-type street: its façades scrubbed and tarted up a bit too much but the famous stores still selling their century-old

Some people, and I am one, feel that Tang (618–907 CE) poetry is the finest literary art they have ever read. But does one need to learn Chinese in order to have such a view, or can classical Chinese poetry be adequately translated?In 1987 Eliot Weinberger, who has written brilliant essays on topics as various as the mystical I Ching (Book of Change), Buddha as “impostor,”

The thought of hearing back from Simon Leys filled me with dread. It was late 1976 and I was an exchange student at a university in Shenyang, in northeast China. I’d only recently learned that Pierre Ryckmans, the man who had taught me Chinese, was none other than Simon Leys, a writer both celebrated and reviled in the French-speaking world.

<p>Jing Tsu's book examines the ways that the Chinese written language has survived waves of iconoclasm and shifts in the politics of cultural authority. </p>

Flicking through the April issue of the Hong Kong Tatler, a glossy high life magazine modeled after the London Tatler, I was reminded of a story I once heard about the Rothschild house in Paris. When Victor Rothschild visited the Avenue de Marigny in 1944, to see what was left of his cousin’s mansion after four years of German occupation, he found not only Baron Robert’s old

Faced with technological and political upheaval, reformers decided that Chinese would need to change in order to survive.

1.Near the beginning of Simon Leys’ marvelous collection of essays is an odd polemic between the author and the late Christopher Hitchens, fought out in these very pages. Leys takes Hitchens to task for attacking Mother Teresa in a book entitled The Missionary Position. He writes: “Bashing an elderly nun under an obscene label does not seem to be a particularly brave or

Loren Goldner's 'bare-bones history' of Maoism.

Banksy’s wit and talent don’t excuse his vandalism and juvenility.

Traces the harrowing 1629 shipwreck of nearly three hundred survivors on small islands off the coast of western Australia who found themselves at the mercy of a visionary psychopath and his team of supporters, a group that brutalized the survivors before eventually slaughtering them in an organized massacre. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Synopsis: In 1629, the ship Batavia, pride of the Dutch East India Company, was wrecked on the edge of a coral archipelago, some fift...