Saturday, April 18, 2009

What is Joshua Fogel reading?

The current featured contributor at Writer's Read: Joshua Fogel, Canada Research Chair in Chinese history at York University in Toronto. He has taught previously at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Ai Ssu-chi's Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism, Nakae Ushikichi in China: The Mourning of Spirit, and the recently published Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time.

One paragraph from his entry:
When not reading in my field, I have recently read a spate of novels by Aharon Appelfeld in English translation. I picked up a few of his novellas some years back but found them almost too spare. I think I got the point—they’re almost all about the Holocaust in one way or another—and I attributed the underwriting to the fact that he only began to learn Hebrew after the war in his teenage years. Then, I read his memoir, The Story of a Life, about his life before and during the war in Bukovina and Ukraine and his first decades of adjustment in Israel after the war. It is a masterpiece, and clearly language is not a problem, though it is something he is consumed with.[read on]
Read Joshua Fogel's biography at Sino-Japanese Studies.

The Page 99 Test: Articulating the Sinosphere.

Writer's Read: Joshua Fogel.

--Marshal Zeringue