Festival Minor
by Ben Nardolilli Dust rises off the floor, I call it a partner, Sure it has callous bad timing, And it gets into the lungs, But am I any better? I’m a particle Sucked into the city, Pulled through the galleries of Manhattan And the avenues of Brooklyn Where I leave behind a trail of…
He Never Dies
by Wang Xu It was two o’clock in the morning. Robert woke up from a nightmare with a huge ache in his belly. He knew it was the cancer. Keeping silent for a moment, he switched on the bedside light. Robert walked towards the window, drew back the curtain, and looked up at the night…
Facing the Buddha
By Beaton Galafa Hangzhou was my first city to visit since I arrived in Zhejiang in mid-September, spending all my days within Jinhua. I had missed a trip to Yiwu earlier out of paranoia. They had mentioned big companies and industries, and I abhor feeding egos of governments that want to parade civilization in front of…
Italo Calvino and Learning from Experimental Fiction
Recently, my students at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong Joint Institute are reading and studying the style of Italo Calvino in his Invisible Cities, and to say the least, they find it frustrating. This book, like many of his books, is hard to categorize and fails to be a novel in any traditional sense of…