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 Subplot is 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.