Nicholas Jose

Who knows what lies ahead for Hong Kong? Its literature shows what did unfold and, collected and translated here under John Minford’s expert guidance, lets us share in what Hong Kong people care so much about.

‘One way the history of a publishing house can be told is through the readers of the books that a publisher produces.’

Taking the means of production and dissemination into your own hands through self-publication throws a spanner into the established system of book marketing and promotional recognition. Is that why Moya Costello’s brilliant, beautiful book, Harriet Chandler, slipped through the net?

Death Fugue is a tale of two Chinas, but not the usual contrast of urban and rural or rich and poor in one of the world’s most unequal societies. Rather, it is a contrapuntal figuring of two opposed dreams of what China could be. ‘China Dream’ is the current mantra emanating from the country’s new supreme leader, Xi Jinping. The promise is an economically rich, militarily powerful and ideally civilised China, run by and for the Communist Party. This replaces the other dream of democracy that was crushed in the protests of 1989.

Analects are gleanings, crumbs under the table, fragments of old text that, in the case of Confucius, have coalesced into a classic. Simon Leys, his latest translator and annotator, seldom misses an opportunity to remind us just how ragged and loopy this little book is — a mere one hundred pages in this edition (requiring another hundred pages of irresistible notes). The Analects consists of brief passages of partially recorded or remembered conversations between the Master and a set of often unidentified interlocuters.

Australia’s Asia offers counter-narratives to the received Australian narrative of Asia, dominated by the implementation, impact and slow dismantling of the White Australia policy.

The Burning Library begins with an incendiary question: ‘Who or what killed Australian literature?’ The book investigates various possible answers before solving the mystery with the surprise discovery that the corpse may not be dead after all.