Everything for empire

Violence, conspiracy, sex, scandals and lies, all for one ultimate goal: maintaining the empire. Javier Moro's meticulous representation of Pedro I de Castilla is now in Chinese. The historical novel El Imperio Eres Tu depicts the king's change from a Don Juan to Don Quixote, with colorful details gleaned from documents and a dollop of imagination. It delineates the king's fare, as well as the shifts in the Portuguese empire. The book won the 2012 People's Literature Publishing House award for Outstanding International Literature and the 2011 Spanish Premio Planeta award.

Chi Zijian in English

Chi Zijian, three-time winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Award, has had her first book translated into English. The Last Quarter of the Moon, an epic narrative of the Ewenki ethnic group in Northeastern China, is published by Harvill Secker. Told from the perspective of an aging and anonymous woman, the story stands witness to the clan's wizardry, lore and gradual disintegration. The book was winner of the 2008 Mao Dun Literary Award. An Italian edition is also available.

From Soviet Poland to China

The Captive Mind, the highly anticipated book by late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz is now available in Chinese. The book about the lives of intellectuals in the 1950s under Soviet rule previously had only a few chapters translated into Chinese, but nevertheless was a cult hit. It is directly translated from Polish to Chinese, this time by Wu Lan and Yi Lijun, with prefaces from several earlier editions. Wei Dong, editor of the book from Guangxi Normal University Press, says he noticed the steadfast following of the book and decided to make it "the most reliable text". It's the second in the press' Milosz series after the Witness of Poetry.

Bushnell's insights on Jobs

When Steve Jobs adopted "think different" as Apple's mantra in the late 1990s, the company's ads featured Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Amelia Earhart and a constellation of other starry-eyed oddballs who reshaped society. Nolan Bushnell never appeared in those tributes, even though Apple was riffing on an iconoclastic philosophy he embraced while running video game pioneer Atari in the early 1970s. Atari's refusal to be corralled by the status quo was one of the reasons Jobs went to work there in 1974 as an unkempt, contemptuous 19-year-old. Bushnell says he always saw something special in Jobs, who evidently came to appreciate his eccentric boss, too. The two remained in touch until shortly before Jobs died in October 2011 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Bushnell's newly released book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent, is about the unorthodox thinking that fosters the kinds of breakthroughs that became Jobs' hallmark as the co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc.

Cussler probes union strikes

Best-selling adventure author Clive Cussler, who published his first book 40 years ago, is still entertaining fans. His newest novel, The Striker, released in March, has already sold thousands of copies. The Striker, Cussler's 55th book, follows detective Isaac Bell's investigation into union strikes in early 1900s coal country. It contains many of the hallmarks of his earlier work. The story pits young Bell against another detective and his ruthless sponsor, both bent on fomenting violence between miners and industrialists. Bell does his best not to take sides as he has roughly a week to thwart a potentially bloody uprising. Cussler, who writes with a co-author, says he will be producing more books, including one for The Fargo Adventure series, another for the underwater exploration series The NUMA Files, and a third for The Oregon Files about Juan Cabrillo and a special US government sponsored group called the Corporation.

China Daily - Reuters

(China Daily 04/02/2013 page19)