Editorial
The red thread of this early summer 2008 issue of the journal is Non-Fiction. First off, four essays proposing that translation is a special case of non-fiction writing, have been gathered by guest editor Emily Goedde in a Special Section. The wide-flung pieces—one concerned with translation and memory, one with the voice a translator might share with a non-fiction writer, one on some rules of editing in the Hebrew Bible, and one on (not) translating Chinese travel literature—all shared at one point a panel at the 2007 NonFictioNow conference in Iowa City.
The red thread of non-fiction winds on, through a series of East Asian spaces: Lawrence Pun meditates on ground rules of urban renewal Hong Kong might be learning from New York. Puja Birla maps her Bombay subway routine from the vantage point of the Ladies’ carriage. The Vietnamese journalist Van Cam Hai describes his encounter with the last (?) Tibetan burial master in Lhasa. And finally, a cluster of writings by Al Mustaqueem Radhi, currently managing a think tank in Kuala Lumpur, should offer a sense of the concerns, strategies, and tone of a liberal Islamist intellectual writing to the current situation in Malaysia.
—The Editor