pathlight – Three Percent

Pathlight Available through Apple, Amazon

Chad Post — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:02:27 +0000

This morning, I talked to a journalist for quite a while about an article she’s writing on publishing Chinese literature in translation. On of the prompts for her article is a magazine that I haven’t mention on here before, but definitely should have.

In addition to a general interest in this magazine—how much do you know about what’s going on in Chinese literature?—it’s also worth mentioning because it’s now available through both and for $6.99. (Which is a decent price for the 277-page Winter issue.)

The complete table of contents for the Winter issue can be found and contains Mo Yan’s Nobel Lecture, along with other pieces about him and his work, along with nine works of fiction and works from ten poets—none of which I’m currently familiar with.

It is kind of stunning that given the size of China, the insane number of writers who live there, and the general interest in what’s going on in the country on the whole, there were only 16 works by Chinese writers translated into English and published here in 2012. One can trot out all the normal reasons to explain why this might be the case, but the biggest in my mind is the utter lack of awareness among U.S. editors as to what’s going on in Chinese literature these days.

Which is why I’m going to be reading more issues of Pathlight . . .

New Issue of Pathlight

Chad Post — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:24:34 +0000

Not sure how I missed the initial announcement of this, but and (wow, that website is something) have gotten together to put out a downloadable magazine featuring “New Chinese Writing.”

The first issue is available for sale through but you can download either an epub or mobi file of issue number 2

Here’s the TOC from Issue 2:

Fiction

Wang Anyi: ‘Dark Alley’

Jia Pingwa: ‘The Hunter’

Medrol: ‘Contract with the Gods’

Mai Jia: ‘A Voice from the Beyond’

Ge Fei: ‘Mona Lisa’s Smile’

Zhou Daxin: ‘Golden Fields of Wheat’

Fang Fang: ‘Yan Wu’

Anni Baobei: ‘Qizhao: Lonely Island’

Lu Min: ‘Hidden Diseases’

Wei Wei: ‘George’s Book’

Guo Wenbin: ‘Blessings of Good Fortune’

A Yi: ‘Common People’

Poetry

Yu Jian: ‘Elephant’, ‘Hometown’, ‘Executing Saddam’, ‘Incident: Wind’, ‘The road I chose . . . still led to sunset and the trees’, ‘Terrorists’, ‘Unspeakable Fear and Longing’

Pan Wei: ‘Dingjiaqiao Village’, ‘Moonlight’

Tian He: ‘Going Home’, ‘Wet Nurse’, ‘Brothers Divide the Household’, ‘Tonight’s Moon’, ‘The Setting Sun’, ‘Earthenware’

Wang Xiaoni: ‘Moonlight is Extremely White’, ‘Thinking This, Then Thinking That’, ‘Those I Don’t Know I Don’t Want to Know’, ‘Early Morning’,‘Starting Anew as a Poet’