KEVIN DONNELLY suggests that the task of transforming cultural spaces is far from over and that photography still has a key role to play
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Window opens on Shanghai
BEN CHACKO recommends an insightful collection of short stories about the people and places of China's biggest city
METROPOLITAN SPLENDOUR: Shanghai by night
[Nicholas Poon]
RITA DI SANTO talks to Scottish-Irish filmmaker MARK COUSINS about his new series The Story of Documentary Film
ALAN MORRISON welcomes a new collection from the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time
CAL McBRIDE relishes the lyrical truth of an unstable identity in an over-tidy and conventional social realist treatment
New releases from Shearwater, Florry, and Navy Blue
CHRIS SEARLE welcomes a startling vision of contemporary Newport from a veteran photographer of the British working class
ANGUS REID recommends a very unusual documentary: a love story between two disillusioned journalists
The Book of Shanghai
Edited by Dai Congrong and Dr Jin Li
(Comma Press, £9.99)
COMMA PRESS’S Reading the City series is an exercise in cultural bridge-building. Collections of short stories from different cities around the world, from Rio to Riga and Birmingham to Tehran, they give readers a snapshot of
the life of remarkable metropolises.
Few are more remarkable than Shanghai, China’s largest city with a population approaching 25 million. It is a fitting microcosm of China’s turbulent modern history, growing from a collection of fishing villages to a vast port after Britain, France and the US seized “concessions” there in the 1840s and acting as a lynchpin of imperialist domination thereafter.
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