Satirical review of the latest addition to Chinese socialist realist fiction.
Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel
Isham Cook
American essayist and novelist based in China since 1994. Writing philosophy: downmarket, big concept, provocative, discriminating, outrageous. Ballard, Beckett, Borges, Dick, Kafka, Hesse, Melville, Mishima, Sade are influences.
Facebook, rococo vulvas, and the pornographic imagination
What happens when wayward algorithms are allowed to censor content on social media.
Magic Theater Books on Facebook
Isham Cook’s latest books and blogs and other news on related topics.
American Rococo: Essays on the Edge
Essays on Western culture ranging from the last Ice Age to the Renaissance to contemporary America’s obsessions and hysterias.
Anglish and English: Why our language is 750 and not 1,500 years old
The conventional history of English force-fed to university students benefits no one but the academic textbook business and its tired stakeholders.
An American talisman
Only a perverted and schizophrenic society dangles sexual temptations to ever-younger people and punishes them brutally.
My problem with the atheists (it’s not what you think)
An atheist patiently explains why most atheists are really believers in disguise.
