Travel | Indonesia Rimbaud in Java Jamie James In the late 1960s, when sensory disorder was all the rage, Rimbaud occupied a high place in the hip literary pantheon with the likes of Hermann Hesse and Jack Kerouac. Hesse and Kerouac didn’t remain on my reading list, but there’s something addictive about Rimbaud – especially among writers, for whom the notion of renouncing the vocation seems a gesture of incomparable grandeur.
Interview | China Ma Jian James Kidd The forgetting of the events of June 4 in Tiananmen Square has been a state-managed exercise. The Chinese government has been very successful in erasing these events from the text books, from the newspapers. Even the soldiers who crushed the students, and who were celebrated as heroes, can’t talk about them. You can’t mention the words ‘Tiananmen massacre’ or June 4.
Fiction | Malaysia Four Days (June 1983) Preeta Samarasan Thangarajah imagined his mother huddled in a barn somewhere as they’d all been during the Japanese occupation, only alone this time, frightened and alone and confused, craving hot rice and fried salted fish just the way she liked it, wasting away, not a single piece of identification on her. He saw her curled up on a bare wooden floor, her small fists pressed to her chest. What would she think of as she sank into unconsciousness?
