Folks, not to brag, but I've all but stopped using social media for a month now (by circumstance rather than by choice) and it's been a lovely holiday for the mind. It also means, in case you're wondering why my boasting is relevant, this month's newsletter is a short one. That's right, like many millennials, I source most of my news from the socials, and that includes Chinese-lit related news.

Here's to a more jampacked newsletter next month, when I inevitably fall back into old habits.

In the meantime, direct your attention toward the upcoming Aberdeen Festival of Translation. By upcoming, I mean it starts on Monday 13th June with a workshop led by Nicky Harman. But there is plenty more to come.

Extracts, stories and poems:

• Yan Lianke & Carlos Rojas on "How Contemporary Chinese Literature Made Western Modernism Its Own"
• May Huang on "The Translator's Guilt" and Eric Yip, who recently became the youngest-ever winner of the National Poetry Competition for "Fricatives". Here, poet and translator, Jenny Wong chats with Eric about his win and his poetry

News:

• The results for the Chinese Nebula Awards are out! Congrats to all! (中文)
• Hong Kong author Xi Xi's Mourning a Breast 哀悼乳房, tr. Jennifer Feeley, will be published by NYRB

Events:

• Aberdeen (Online) Festival of (Chinese) Translation is back for a second year! With editing, subtitling, mixed media, pitching workshops and more, as well as a wuxia translation slam, roundtable on the business of translation, and Brian Holton on translating Classical Chinese into Scots!
• Watch the HK Arts Development Council Awards, with special congrats to Dorothy Tse Hiu Hung 謝曉虹, Artist of the Year (Literary); So Yuen Shan 蘇苑姍, Young Artist of the Year (Literary)；Xi Xi 西西, Life Achievement Award

Reviews and releases:

• Check out the 14 books translated from Chinese that Book Riot says you have to read
• The Modern Novel reviews Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi, tr. Jeremy Tiang
• The blurbs for Han Song's Hospital are available to read - "Demented, delirious, and one of a kind…"
• Locus Mag reviews The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, ed. Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang - "both an important and enjoyable anthology, giving a cohort of wildly talented writers a wider audience"
• A review of Cocoon by Zhang Yueran, tr. Jeremy Tiang
• Kyle Muntz reviews The Chilli Bean Paste Clan by Yan Ge, tr. Nicky Harman
• Out now The Empress in the Pepper Chamber by Zhao Feiyan, tr. Olivia Milburn
• China's Kafka? The Chinese Lit Podcast talk Can Xue

Media:

• A sneak peek at Writing Historical Fiction, a master class with author Zhang Ling
• "Birdsong and stolen cherries", writer Yang Shen on Lockdown life in Shanghai
• Listen to Michael Berry on Fang Fang's Wuhan diary
• A Spitoon podcast with Chinese Editor-In-Chief, Zuo Fei, on her Chinese poetry blog in China and the growth of interest and collaboration between western and eastern fans of literature and poetry in China
• Stop Pretending All Books Are Written in English, from the NY Times
• Read about translation for streaming platforms