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Podcast: New Books in Popular Culture
Episode: Megan Walsh, "The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters" (Columbia Global Reports, 2022)
Description: What does contemporary China’s diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics?
The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters (Columbia Global Reports, 2022) by Megan Walsh takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you’ve never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel-laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden-age of sci-fi. Chinese o...