On Monday, June 13, Maxine Hong Kingston will be joined in an online conversation by Gish Jen, author of The Resisters, at 92Y to celebrate the publication of a Library of America edition of Kingston’s books The Woman Warrior, Tripmaster Monkey, China Men, and other collected writings.
For the New York Review of Books, doctor and poet Laura Kolbe considers three new books that explore pain’s origins and how we attempt to explain and quantify pain: “Our appetite for explanation is large, because most of us have at some point deeply desired to convey what our own pain is like, or to know what that of another is like, and have run into problems. It’s the old question of whether everyone sees color the same way, but with higher stakes: whether a person’s pain is communicable and commensurate with another’s can affect how much we might feel we owe one another emotionally, socially, and politically.”
Granta shares a selection of drawings by Franz Kafka, which have just been published in a volume by Yale University Press (despite the fact that the writer directed Max Brod to destroy them after his death along with his diaries, letters, and manuscripts).
In Vulture, Harron Walker profiles Imogen Binnie as her novel Nevada is set to be republished by MCD/FSG and Picador UK nine years after its debut. Since going out of print, Nevada has become a word-of-mouth must-read of trans literature. Walker notes that Binnie never thought a mainstream publisher would be interested: “She imagined for the book, which she wrote over four years, an audience like herself: trans women who craved fiction about trans women that didn’t make them regret learning how to read.”
Raksha Vasudevan interviews Vauhini Vara about her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, for High Country News. Of writing sections of the book about climate change in Colorado during the wildfires of 2020, Vara said: “I remember writing that during that weird summer, when you would look up at the sky and it was gorgeous, but wrongly gorgeous.”