Robert Anthony Siegel

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  interviews December 20, 2013

  Bookforum Talks with 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 travels the world freely, giving remarkably candid interviews to foreign journalists and writing hard-hitting op-ed pieces for The New York Times on Chinese politics and culture.

  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 travels the world freely, giving

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  interviews September 27, 2013

  Bookforum talks with Karen E. Bender

  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.

  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.

  Bender’s most recent book, A Town of Empty Rooms, is a big, intricately plotted work of realism, the sort that manages to draw connections between the personal and the political without artificiality or strain. It

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  interviews August 14, 2013

  Bookforum talks with Peter Trachtenberg

  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.

  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 more