Brian Castro NEWS
Come to a day-long seminar featuring readings and dialogue with Transpacific Mixed Race authors Brian Castro (Shanghai Dancing, Kaya Press), Kien Nguyen, and Paisley Rekdal presented by the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. The seminar will address these questions: “How do Transpacific mixed-race authors inscribe and represent their heritage in their artistic representations? […]
From South Asian Kenyans struggling under the threat of expulsion, to Samoan girls on the cusp of womanhood, to a word-obsessed, multiracial Aussie piecing together his family’s past through fragments of letters and half-forgotten stories. The characters found in Kaya Press books are as provocative and nuanced as the writers who give them voice. Celebrate […]
Shanghai Dancing
After forty years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness and rootlessness he calls “shanghai dancing,” António seeks to understand his anxiety by retracing the wanderings of his Chinese, Portuguese, and English families.
Arriving in Shanghai, where his families collided, António’s world fragments: glittering prewar China, evangelical Liverpool, and 17th century Portugal fight for space with contemporary scenes of Asia Europe, and Australia. The stories of long-dead ancestors vie with those of new friends, family, and lovers.
Combining photographs and written images, author Brian Castro’s fictional autobiography asks if life’s meaning is to be found in the moment or in memory. This “work of major significance [that] challenges our expectations of storytelling” is the US debut of one of Australia’s most complex and celebrated literary figures.
praise
“Brian Castro plays with past and present in this complex, teasing, polyrhythmic, carnivalesque dance through phantom Shanghai.”
— J.M. Coetzee
“[A]n extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene…. told in Castro’s characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay.
— The Age
awards
Winner, Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction
Winner, Christina Stead Fiction Prize
Winner, NSW Premier’s Book of the Year
Brian Castro NEWS
Come to a day-long seminar featuring readings and dialogue with Transpacific Mixed Race authors Brian Castro (Shanghai Dancing, Kaya Press), Kien Nguyen, and Paisley Rekdal presented by the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. The seminar will address these questions: “How do Transpacific mixed-race authors inscribe and represent their heritage in their artistic representations? […]
From South Asian Kenyans struggling under the threat of expulsion, to Samoan girls on the cusp of womanhood, to a word-obsessed, multiracial Aussie piecing together his family’s past through fragments of letters and half-forgotten stories. The characters found in Kaya Press books are as provocative and nuanced as the writers who give them voice. Celebrate […]
