MCLC: Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair

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Censorship and salesmanship at US book fair
Source: The New Yorker (6/5/15)
Censorship and Salesmanship at America’s Biggest Book Fair
BY CHRISTOPHER BEAM
One evening last week, a group of writers, including Paul Auster, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Ha Jin, Francine Prose, and Murong Xuecun, gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library to denounce censorship in China. Franzen read aloud a letter written by the Uighur scholar Ilham Tohti, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2014 after being convicted of separatism. Homes read a poem by Liu Xia, the wife of the imprisoned democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo. Behind them, protesters held up Shepherd Fairey–style portraits of the artist Ai Weiwei and the Tibetan writer Woeser. A sign in front read “Governments Make Bad Editors.”
The rally, organized by the PEN American Center, was timed to coincide with BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s largest trade show in the United States, which was held across three days at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. As this year’s “guest of honor,” the Chinese government had sent a delegation of more than five hundred people from a hundred publishing houses, as well as twenty-four authors, and had rented twenty-five thousand square feet of space for a China-themed pavilion. “The Chinese government is using B.E.A. to paint a rosy picture of the world of letters in China, and to present its approved literature to the world,” said Andrew Solomon, president of the PEN American Center, in a speech on the library steps. (more…)
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 10, 2015
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