Miscellaneous

December 28th, 2021
Q&A with Shen Fuyu - Author of "The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village"

Born in Shen Village in Southeast China in 1970, Shen Fuyu grew up in a family of farmers. Years later, Shen, now a writer, returned to his hometown to capture the village’s rich history in the face of industrialization. The Artisans, his first book published in English (translated by Jeremy Tiang) is out today from Astra House. Below, he answers some questions about his process and inspirations in bringing his hometown to life.

You mention in the introduction of the book that once you left Shen Village at age 18, every time you returned it had changed for the worse—declining population, crumbling houses, and the encroachment of industrialization. Can you talk about this realization and how the...

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October 5th, 2021
Q&A with Kate McIntyre - Author of "Mad Prairie"

In one of the latest additions to the University of Georgia Press’s Flannery O’Connor Award Series, essayist and fiction writer Kate McIntyre renders unsettling, complicated, and borderline fantastical the lives of seemingly ordinary people in a seemingly ordinary place. The prairie is simultaneously a place like no other and one where many Americans could see themselves represented. 

In the correspondence below, Mad Prairie’s author shares some of her cinematic influences, her intentions, the peculiarities of Midwestern diction, and the ways in which the last five years, shaped by a violently divisive...

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August 11th, 2021
Review: Soledad Maura on Sarah Thomas's "Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain's Long Transition"

The abundance of child protagonists in Spanish literature and film is immediately apparent to any student of Peninsular culture. Many introductory Spanish Literature courses start with the Lazarillo de Tormes, the picaresque child who barely survives the school of hard knocks that is sixteenth century Spain. In this brilliant, short novel, social and religious satire abound. Writing this was a risky venture for the period of the Inquisition, and clearly the reason why the author chose to remain anonymous. The threat of censorship is a great reason for having a young, uneducated boy as the narrator and main character. The child narrator is not as threatening as an adult....

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