BOOK OK THE DAY

Review

On Censorship by Ai Weiwei review – are we losing the battle for free speech? 

China isn’t the only country imposing limits on creative expression, argues the provocative artist

Sukhdev Sandhu

Thu 22 Jan 2026 

Chinese culture is the opposite of provocation,” Ai Weiwei once told an interviewer. “It tries to seek harmony in human nature and society.” Harmony has never been his bag. Provocation though? In spades. As a student at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s, he joined an artist group called Stars that had a slogan: “We Demand Political Democracy and Artistic Freedom”. In the 1990s, returning to Beijing after a decade in downtown New York, he and a couple of friends published and distributed samizdat-style books devoted to off-piste, often-political art of the kind that government censors tend to fear.

 

FICTION IN TRANSLATION

Review

My Cat Yugoslavia review – the refugee experience as surreal comic fable

This article is more than 8 years old

Pajtim Statovci’s debut novel flits between genres to create a memorably disconcerting tale about life as an outsider in modern Europe

Sukhdev Sandhu

Sun 3 Sep 2017 09.00 BST

Kosovo-born Finnish writer Pajtim Statovci’s debut novel begins with a chap called blackhetero-helsinki prowling the internet in search of “fun and games”, continues with a lonely immigrant student getting into a relationship first with a boa constrictor and then a haughty cat he meets in a bar singing along to Cher’s Believe, and ends with a series of ruminations about the violence of men, of memory, of migration. If this sounds whimsical, don’t worry; My Cat Yugoslavia is a striking work about dislocation and estrangement that moves between science fiction, comic fable and trauma narrative without ever settling snugly into any of them.

BOOK OF THE DAY

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward review – slow apocalypse of black America

The Top 10 Novels of 2017

This award-winning portrait of a Mississippi family blighted by drugs and prison is a fierce critique of US history

Sukhdev Sandhu
Friday 24 November 2017

Sing, Unburied, Sing begins as it mostly means to go on: in blackness. A teenager named Jojo finds himself in a place of dirt and mud and slime and blood. His grandfather is showing him how to kill a goat: how to slit its throat, how to slice its stomach and reach in for its intestines. There are terrible bleating and gurgling sounds. The smell “overwhelms like a faceful of pig shit”. Buzzards hover above. Soon the youngster is throwing up in the grass. Not much later he’ll be eating the goat’s liver in a plate full of gravy.