Robert Anthony Siegel
Yan Lianke Yan Lianke occupies a contradictory place in the landscape of contemporary Chinese literature: He is one of the country’s foremost novelists—winner of both the Lu Xun and Lao She prizes—but four of his books have been banned and can only be read in foreign editions. Once a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army (where he had a job writing propaganda), he lost his commission in 2004 after the publication of the Chinese edition of Lenin’s Kisses and was, for a period, barred from leaving the country. But the political winds have shifted yet again, and he now 
It felt a little odd sitting in a cafe in Taichung, Taiwan, waiting for my wife, the novelist Karen E. Bender, to arrive. We usually come to this café together from our house down the road, carrying our books for Chinese class, but that day we wanted to treat this interview with a measure of formality: two writers in conversation about a new novel and the practice of novel writing. Peter Trachtenberg’s Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons is the memoir of a cat owner impelled almost against his will (and certainly against his better judgment) to fly from North Carolina to New York in search of his missing cat. It is also an account of a dissolving marriage, and a far-flung and highly erudite meditation on the nature of love. Trachtenberg is no stranger to asking big-picture questions through seemingly small subjects. His memoir, Seven Tattoos, moved effortlessly from the death rites of the Ngaju of Borneo to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, becoming