Isham Cook’s latest books and blogs and other news on related topics.
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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.
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.
The 1.3 billion-strong temper tantrum: Review of Arthur Meursault’s Party Members
Why this vicious satire of contemporary China that’s causing readers to gag had to be written.
Living the Taiping: Interview with James Lande
Lande’s historical novel set during the Taiping Rebellion cultivates a richly textured and musical English.
