Photograph of a Shanghai bookstore taken by the Editor in 2003. The shop stands (or perhaps stood, as given how quickly Shanghai is changing, it may have closed by now) on Fuzhou Road, a few blocks west of the Huangpu River, very close to the city's famous Bund. Fuzhou Road has a long association with literature and is sometimes referred to as Shanghai's “culture” street. The image thus speaks both to China's contemporary orientation toward the future (through the shop's name) and also to its literary traditions (through its location), tying it to both of the essays that open this issue.
We begin with a trio of interconnected essays that, while written in a manner to engage scholars working on varied parts of Asia, explore issues and publications specific to contemporary China. In the first, “Finding a Place: Mainland Chinese Fiction in the 2000s,” Julia Lovell, a...
