Mini Gautam is a lawyer and has been writing from a young age. Her work has won numerous awards. Her first novel “The Gutter Princess – Diary of an (Un)Willing Prostitute” was published in India in 2017, and her short stories have appeared in various magazines both in India and abroad. A Muslim Takes a Dip in the Ganges It is believed in the Hindu religion that a dip in the holy...
One of the pillars of traditional Japanese poetry, the renga consists of verses alternating between a haiku and a couplet. In gatherings of poets, the renga was often employed as a form of play, with each poet adding one verse to the chain that ultimately formed the complete renga. On 12 May 2018, Literary Shanghai hosted an event called “Renga in the Plum Garden” in Lu Xun Park, Shanghai. As...
Johanna M. Costigan is a writer from New York who lives in Shanghai, China. Baby Diplomacy No wonder the jails don’t fill. English was offered as enrichment; some people are their own identifiers. Stop reprimanding her for painting the subway or claiming the abandoned money. She was just doing the bare minimum under improvised provinces; promises stepping over city lines. Europe, the paper...
SHELLY BRYANT divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a poet, writer, and translator. She is the author of eight volumes of poetry (Alban Lake and Math Paper Press), a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai (Urbanatomy), and a book on classical Chinese gardens (Hong Kong University Press). She has translated work from the Chinese for Penguin Books, Epigram...
Rita Mookerjee’s poetry is featured or forthcoming in Lavender Review, Sorority Mansion Review, and Spider Mirror Journal. Her critical work has been featured in the Routledge Companion of Literature and Food, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory. She currently teaches ethnic minority fiction and...
If this life is a performance, then surely this performance is a stage performance and not a cinematic one. For we are confronted not by the camera, but by the living audience. We act as we are meant to do, for there can be no editing. If we give a lousy performance, there is no way to take it back, because there are no additional takes for the taking. What makes life more difficult than any...
Kanchan Chatterjee works in the Finance Ministry of the Government of India as a tax officer. He has been writing poems and haiku since 2012. His poems have been published in a variety of ezines. He received an honourable mention for his entry in the 2017 Eto En Oi Ocha haiku contest in Japan. rendezvous the old man looked up and recognized me instantly… I said I’d not expected...
Kaleidoscope We are all familiar with the kaleidoscope. Our childhood days were spent looking through the mirror of the kaleidoscope at the countless, beautiful images. As we turn it continuously, the images change endlessly. But smash the kaleidoscope open, and you will find nothing but bits of coloured paper inside. Our lives are no different. As the wheel of life turns, many things are...
Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646) is one of the great late-Ming writers, but his importance as a poet has been undervalued, almost certainly as a result of his political notoriety, which still affects views of him today. However, his outstanding contributions to drama are generally recognised and he is considered one of the leading playwrights of the generation after Tang Xianzu. Ruan was born into a...
Coffeehouse In the bustling city, we often stumble upon elegant coffeehouses with their warm lights and soothing music. We step in and the cacophony of the streets are left to the world beyond the thick glass doors. We can sink ourselves into comfortable chairs, enjoy the music, and sip our drinks. All is well with the world. Yet eventually, work demands our attention. Emerging from the...