Simon Leys, novelist, unflinching cultural and political commentator, Sinologist, and occasional illustrator, presents here timely meditations on the experience and hazards of literary translation. Preceding his essay are observations on everything from demented tyrants to musical geniuses who gain insights from vacuum cleaners. Leys is rightly renowned for his wisdom, his insight, and his linguistic and literary expertise.

An NYRB Classics Original
Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first Westerners to recognize the appalling toll of Mao s Cultural Revolution, Leys also writes with unfailing intelligence, seriousness, and bite about European art, literature, history, and politics and is an unflinching observer of the way we live now.
The Hall of Uselessness is the most extensive collection of Leys s essays to be published to date. In it, he addresses subjects ranging from the Chinese attitude...