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Illinois legislature revives “Amazon tax”; an open letter to Librarian of Congress James Billington; the state of Washington’s new poet laureate; and other news.
Andrew Wylie versus Amazon; an online reading in honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month; North Korea’s bookstores; and other news.
The Bible as America’s favorite book; the popularity of Rumi; an introduction to the best Chinese literature in translation; and other news.
In her second novel, Julie Otsuka returns to the chapter in Japanese American history that captured the attention of so many fans of her debut: the relocation camps of World War II.
Cathy Park Hong is a poet interested in the porous boundaries between languages and cultures. In her newest collection, Dance Dance Revolution (Norton, 2007), winner of the 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Hong creates a poem sequence that takes place in a future city called the Desert. It is in this tourist town, modeled on the likes of Las Vegas and Dubai, that Hong introduces the Guide, an amalgam of new and extinct English dialects, Korean, Latin, Spanish, and other miscellaneous pidgins. Acting as the reader's escort, Hong uses the Guide to address the issues of identity, both personally and geographically, in an increasingly globalized world.
