A celebrated novelist grapples with “Moby-Dick”
Xiaolu Guo, a fisherman’s daughter, reimagines the whaling epic with added Taoism
XIAOLU GUO has always been interested in people who leave. “A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers”, her novel published in 2007, follows a Chinese woman studying in London. The protagonist in “20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth” (2008) forsakes her sleepy home in rural China for Beijing, an ever-changing city “that never showed its gentle side”.
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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “I grapple with thee”
Culture
April 19th 2025
From the April 19th 2025 edition
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What to watch this weekend
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The six best screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels
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The morals of “Sinners”, a fantasia of vampires and the blues
Ryan Coogler’s hit film is a riff on the uses and abuses of genre
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What people should learn from rivers
Robert Macfarlane and James Scott seek to understand the ways of water
How golden ages really start—and end
The greatest civilisations of the past 3,000 years were the opposite of MAGA