By Edward Nawotka

Our good friend and frequent contributor Wenguang Huang has published excerpt of his forthcoming memoir in the new issue of The Paris Review, alongside interviews with novelist David Mitchell, cartoonist R. Crumb, and fiction from Katherine Dunn, Colum McCann, and Ann Beattie.

The piece, entitled “Coffin Keeper,” begins: “When I was nine, I shared my bedroom with a coffin. My father had it made for my grandmother for her seventy-third birthday and referred to it as shou mu, which means something like “longevity wood,” and seemed like a strange name for the box Grandma would be buried in. The practice of burial had been banned in China since soon after the Communists took over, so I couldn’t tell anyone about it.”

Intrigued? Read more here.