mulberry road

17:47 5th Feb 2013

Tags: Cordite reviews Gig Ryan Lisa Gorton Ali Alizadeh

… I’d like to welcome Lisa Gorton – accomplished poet, critic, editor, educator and thinker – into the fold as Cordite’s current Reviews Editor. It’s an ideal fit. We’re most enthused to have her on board. Cordite will continue to do a mix of feature-length and short reviews for 2013 and thereafter. But with this dawning of the Gorton age in Cordite’s reviews, I imagine new ideas, directions and policy are at hand. As they ought to be.

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Cordite news from Kent McCarter: sadly, Ali Alizadeh is stepping down as reviews editor. However, he is to be replaced by Lisa Gorton.

(Note also that Gig Ryan is editing Cordite 42:NO THEME II issue. )

Gorton, Alizadeh and the blog … (again) | Cordite Poetry Review

16:12 12th Jan 2013

Tags: The Rest Is Weight Jennifer Mills reviews Genevieve Tucker

Fearless - Jennifer Mills’ short fiction : The Ember

Well, what a time that took! Hope you were not holding your breath waiting for my review of Jennifer Mills’ rich and rewarding story collection, released in June last year. Many things got in the way, including another delayed review…

But, here it is. Crossblogging to follow, when I have unpacked my beach stuff.

13:56 22nd Apr 2012

Tags: reviews

Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears – review | Books | The Observer

A short review in the Guardian on the UK release of Foal’s Bread.
(My review for The Ember is here.)

19:20 27th Jan 2012

Notes: 5

Tags: reviews

My review of Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears is now up at The Ember.

14:59 26th Jan 2012

Notes: 1

Tags: memoir reviews

Mrs Winterson continued to have an effect on life choices far removed from her own experience: ‘She hated the small and the mean, and yet that is all she had. I bought a few big houses myself along the way, simply because I was trying out something for her. In fact, my tastes are more modest – but you don’t know that until you have bought and sold for the ghost of your mother.’

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Rather tough essay-review on Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? This quote happens to be something I rather sympathise with, even consider it to be something my own family members do.

Sure, Winterson may be a bit larger than life, but some of her experiences are not that unusual, surely. Mars-Jones’ essay is perceptive, but borders on harsh for the most part.

Adam Mars-Jones, LRB 26.

14:55

Notes: 1

Tags: reviews

Friendship is so important that in English, even before the rise of Facebook, the word friend was spoken and written more than any other relational term, including mother or father.

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You’ve got to have friends | Inside Story

Anna Cristina Pertierra reviewed three books on friendship, on and offline, for Inside Story earlier this year.

Tags: reading reviews

The Country and the City

lareviewofbooks:

KATE MERKEL-HESS on two new histories of rural China

and MAURA ELIZABETH CUNNINGHAM on Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions
Empty Stools of Rural Village Life in China (Xinhua) from All-China Women’s Federation http://bit.ly/nF7Ack
KATE MERKEL-HESS
Gail Hershatter
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past
University of California Press, August 2011. 472 pp.

Jacob Eyferth
Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots: The Social History of a Community of Handicraft Papermakers in Rural Sichuan, 1920-2000
Harvard University Asia Center, 2009. 335 pp.

Until recently, “China” brought to mind for most Americans farms, farmers, and the rural countryside, not the factories and mass industrialization we think of today. This view of a more rural China is what also once dominated the most widely read books about the country, from the hardworking impoverished villagers of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, to the rural rebels of journalist Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China. It’s easy to forget about the rural facets of this populous nation in the midst of its freeways and fast trains, skyscrapers and construction sites. This isn’t surprising, since China has more urban centers of a million-plus residents than any other country on earth and, for the first time in its history, as many people living in cities as in villages. Last year, Chinese scholars predicted that its rural population would halve by 2030, from today’s 900 million to 400 million. Meanwhile, the gap between wealthy urban areas and their poor rural counterparts grows ever wider: 99 percent of China’s most impoverished citizens hail from the countryside.

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