Literary disruptions of an American in China.
Isham Cook on Twitter
American massage
After long experience in East and Southeast Asia, the author turns his attention to the massage scene in his home country.
The Kitchens of Canton. A novel
Dystopian satire distilling the worst of our present and future into a strangely seductive maze of a story.
Massage diary: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam
Wending my way through Mekong River territory to sample some of the world’s most varied massage offerings.
Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel
Satirical review of the latest addition to Chinese socialist realist fiction.
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.
Living the Taiping
Historical novel set during Taiping Rebellion cultivates a richly textured English, while another captures Sir Robert Hart’s love for a Chinese woman.
From Van Gogh to the Camino de Santiago: Symbolic travel and the modern pilgrim
The exponential growth in international tourism seen in the context of European travel and tourism stretching back a millennium.
The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd
What happens to writing when it’s fed through the political correctness machine.
John Dowland and the lost English Consort School of chamber music
England was home to the first great school of classical chamber music, preceding the Viennese School of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven by two centuries.
