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The Library Is Open

A blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses. Every book gets a gay rating.

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Tag: Farming

Review: The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan (translated by Howard Goldblatt)

A potent depiction of a time and a place, and seething critique of corruption.

China, Farming, Fiction, Nobel Laureate, Novel, Translation

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The early 20th Century German biologist Jacob von Uexküll conceived of an animal’s sensory world as its Umwelt. To try to understand an animal’s Umwelt would be like travelling, he said. Ed Yong vividly conjures these other worlds in this majestic and intimate travelogue of animals’ interior worlds.

White Noise is Don DeLillo’s version of the US suburban parody-horror, like Edward Scissorhands or Stranger Things or Desperate Housewives. It follows Jack Gladney, a professor and inventor of Hitler studies at a liberal arts college, and his family as they try to extract meaning out of their lives. It’s very droll and often amusing — I particularly enjoyed the parody of post-modernist, post-structuralist disciplines, but also that DeLillo seems to yearn for the meaning these studies invest in things.

I screamed, cackled and winced my way through this delicious collection of short stories.

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