THE SUBPLOT

British journalist Megan Walsh tells a truth often overlooked about Western attitudes to Chinese fiction—that“‘banned in China’ is too often the baseline for what is and isn’t worth reading.”International publishers still promote 20-year-old works by the gray-haired Yan Lianke,Mo Yan,and Su Tong as if they were still hot off the press.Walsh fasts-forward to the present day in this whistle-stop tour of China’s literary landscape of the 2000s and 2010s,dissecting the trends shaping what China is currently reading,from the rebellious blog posts of the curtain-haired Han Han to the latest pulp fiction churned out for apps at the speed of light.The Subplotis a quick read (clocking in at a little over 100 pages),informed and broad in scope,pointing out that just because China’s writers and readers operate under the gaze of government censors,it doesn’t mean they do what they’re told.