Isaac Stone Fish
Isaac Stone Fish lives in Beijing and is involved in literature and media.
The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
ISAAC STONE FISH | 10 June 2009Beijing born YIYUN LI's career biography reads like a wish-list for aspiring authors. The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories have published her work. Her masterful first collection of short stories A Thousand Years of Good Prayers won the PEN/Hemmingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and was... [ more ]
Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China by James Fallows
ISAAC STONE FISH | 17 May 2009James Fallows has gone through great lengths to engage with China as a reporter. He first visited in 1986 as part of the delegation to the World Esperanto Congress; this required him and his family to study Esperanto. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he traveled to the country on various reporting trips. As the Olympics began to loom in the summer of 2006, Fallows, a former editor of The U.S. News & World Report, and... [ more ]
The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flas Fiction from Contemporary China by Shouhua Qi (ed.)
ISAAC STONE FISH | 03 April 2009Ever since the rise of the Internet and the fall of the attention span the genre of flash fiction has boomed in China. Known in Chinese as "Minute Story", "Pocket-Size Story", "Palm-Size Story", or "Smoke-Long... [ more ]
Bad Traffic by Simon Lewis
ISAAC STONE FISH | 12 March 2009"This man have come from China to find his daughter who have some trouble. He does not speak English." The novel begins with this phrase as a tough, befuddled Chinese inspector named Jian grasps an airplane boarding pass with this message scribbled on the back. By setting Britain as the strange land of this mystery/thriller, SIMON LEWIS tweaks the conventions of the genre, casting a Chinese as the anti-hero and Britain as his... [ more ]
Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing by Jeffrey Tayler
ISAAC STONE FISH | 23 February 2009The "New Great Game" is over, and the West has lost. JEFFREY TAYLER, a correspondent for The Atlantic, spent three months traveling from Red Square to Tiananmen Square, exploring the under-reported, resource-rich, mostly Muslim hinterlands of Central Asia that are integral to the stability of Russia and China. Tayler wanted to see for himself "how people are getting by in the villages and rust belt towns and ignored... [ more ]
The China Lover by Ian Buruma
ISAAC STONE FISH | 11 December 2008"Don't be a frog in the Japanese well," urges Yoshiko Yamaguchi throughout this enchanting fictionalized account of modern Japanese history and one of its lesser known personages.
Born in Manchuria to Japanese parents, Yamaguchi becomes a famous Mandarin language actress and singer in World War 2 China, partially by keeping her Japanese identity a secret. After a brief stint acting in postwar Japan,... [ more ]
Little Hut of Leaping Fishes by Chiew-Siah Tei
ISAAC STONE FISH | 06 November 2008The family under the stern roof of Master Chai. The opium smoking brute son Likang. His brother, the cautious and intelligent Liwei forced into managing the poppy fields by his father. The grand kids. Half-brothers, one, Mingyuan, a gambler, pawning family jade for another taste of the dice. Mingzhi. The hero. A Judge Bao, an upright figure of great erudition in the troublesome times of late 19th century China. That, in... [ more ]
