From The New York Times, via A Glimpse of the World blog:
Writers have an honored history of staying ahead of convention. Whether through muckraking, parody, irony or dissidence, fiction maintains its relevance, and when it’s good, its prescience, too.
This point was brought home to me recently, when in the midst of a major, continuing corruption scandal here with huge political overtones, I discovered a new author.
Watching the Shanghai scandal unfold, one conclusion seemed inescapable: The authorities were struggling to have it both ways – to take credit for a cleanup and yet to decide at their own convenience just how far it would go. [Full Text]
