When a Billion Chinese Jump (reviewed here) looks at the lengthy list of nightmarish environmental crises both ongoing and pending in China. Author Jonathan Watts talked to us about his book and the conclusions writing it led him to.

Book review: When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind – Or Destroy It

This book is getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so. Guardian correspondent Jonathan Watts traveled around China investigating the environmental effects of the last 30 years of incredible economic growth, and found plenty to despair about. The damage started even earlier in fact, and Watts persuasively shows that the Great Leap Forward was even more disastrous than thought.

Hilary Spurling’s biography of the famed author is a gem

Pearl Buck occupies a strange place in literature. To quote The New York Times, “In China she is admired but not read, and in America she is read but not admired.” The critical consensus is that her bestselling novels were overpraised at the time, and her 1938 Nobel Prize now provokes a collective wince from the academy. In this thoughtful and subtle new biography, focusing primarily on Buck’s time in China, Hilary Spurling (winner of the 2006 Whitbread Prize) pushes back against this conventional wisdom.

Glamour Bar’s mini lit line-up promises clever conversation

"A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet,” Truman Capote once mused. It would take a bold person to argue with that (or Truman Capote), so let’s just say that this month the insufficiency of good conversation is about to be temporarily alleviated thanks to Glamour Bar’s ‘Cosmopolitan Conversations’ series.

Cecilie Gamst Berg’s Blonde Lotus is a riot
    
Part travelogue of a directionless backpacker, part bedtime story of a frisky European who enjoys seducing young Chinese guys “out of the festering prison of virginity,” Blonde Lotus is a riotous semi-autobiographical novel of Hong Kong–based Norwegian expat Cecilie Gamst Berg via her spunky alter-ego protagonist Kat Glasø.

Kat accidentally arrives in late-1980s China (“All I wanted was to be on the train; I had no interest in the journey’s destination, Beijing”) back when the mighty bicycle was still king of the capital and foreign tourists were a rare sighting. Expecting a people with “long, billowing sleeves, reciting poetry and plucking at stringed instruments,” what she finds instead are shady money changers and young hipsters whose knowledge of English is limited to the words ‘Okay-la’ and ‘Sex!’ Lulled by their charming incessancy, Kat shrugs her shoulders and good-naturedly gives it to them – the money and the sex. “How could so many men find the women of a race attractive, and so few women find the men the same,” she ponders postcoitally over a shared Zhongnanhai cigarette.