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How can one author be among the most bitterly rejected writers in one cultural context, while being one of the most celebrated in another? For decades, the works of the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) have been fiercely attacked by critics and scholars in Europe and North America who questioned their literary value and naïve Habsburg nostalgia. Yet in other parts of the world, such as in China, Zweig’s works have enjoyed not only continued admiration but also truly exceptional influence, popularity, and even canonical status. China’s Stefan Zweig unveils the extraordinary success story of Zweig’s novellas in China, from the first translations in the 1920s, shortly after the collapse of the Chinese Empire, through the Mao era to the contemporary People’s Republic. Extensive research in China has unearthed a wealth of hitherto unexplored Chinese-language sources which evidence that Zweig has been read in an entirely different way there. Traversing a truly global system of cultural transfer and several intermediary spaces, Zweig’s works have been selected and employed for very different literary and ideological purposes throughout turbulent times in China. Declared to be a powerful critic of bourgeois society, the Chinese way of reading Zweig reveals important new perspectives on one of the most successful and, at the same time, most misunderstood European writers of the twentieth century.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, essays, and performance scripts have garnered considerable praise from scholars and reviewers, and are taught not only in the United States but in at least half a dozen countries in Asia, South America, Europe. Her work has been written about in numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Karen Tei Yamashita: Fictions of Magic and Memory is the first anthology given over to Yamashita’s writing. It contains newly commissioned essays by established, international scholars; a recent interview with the author; a semiautobiographical keynote address delivered at an international conference that ruminates on her Japanese American heritage; and a full bibliography. The essays offer fresh and in-depth readings of the magic realist canvas of Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990); the Japanese emigrant portraiture of Brazil-Maru (1992); Los Angeles as rambunctious geopolitical and transnational fulcrum of the Americas in Tropic of Orange (1997); the fraught relationship of Japanese and Brazilian heritage and labor in Circle K Cycles (2001); Asian American history and politics of the1960s in I Hotel (2010); and Anime Wong (2014), a gallery of performativity illustrating the contested and inextricable nature of East and West. This essay-collection explores Yamashita’s use of the fantastical, the play of emerging transnational ethnicity, and the narrative tactics of reflexivity and bricolage in storytelling located on a continuum of the unique and the communal, of the past and the present, and that are mapped in various spatial and virtual realities.