Peter Hessler has been one of the most consistently popular attendees at the Beijing International Literary Festival over the years, and his wonderful River Town and Oracle Bones are essential reading for China watchers. Hessler will be talking about his new work, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory at this year’s festival – note the date of his talk has changed. A second talk, Beijing Through a Lens, featuring Hessler and Mike Meyer (Last Days of Old Beijing) has also been moved to a different time and bigger venue - which means more tickets will be available for this previously sold-out event (see details at the end of this post). In the meantime, the travel website WORLDHUM has published an interview with Hessler, in which in discusses the epic drives he undertook in writing his new book.

Ah, Peter Hessler. The China writer we all know and love, and whom we're all just a little bit jealous of, because, hey, who hasn't thought, "Oh man, I just got ripped off, I should write a book!" Of course, Hessler's written not one but three books about his experiences in China, each of them setting pretty high standards for depth, insight, and humor. But that's ok, it just means the rest of us have to come up with niche angles. Like, "Oh man, I just got ripped off and had the royal rumbles at the same time!" There you go.

Leslie Chang's Factory Girls follows the lives of the young women who've left their farming villages in search of material gain and self-development in the factories of southern China. She grows especially close to two women, Min and Chunming, whose stories about black market driving licenses and unstable work situations shed light on migrant subculture in a way other China reporting has failed to do. Before Chang appears at the Bookworm Festival this week, we talked with her about her work in China, and the challenges of writing with twin babies on her arm:

In advance of his talk yesterday – which kicked off the first event in this year’s Bookworm International Literary Festival, Dave Eggers opens up about getting lost, visits to the Flying Pigeon Bicycle Factory, his narrative nonfiction writing process, balloon animals, and how publishing is most definitely not dying.

With bookshop shelves heavy with scores of China-related titles these days, making sense of the China book field can be daunting. Over at the History News Network, Jeffrey Wasserstrom has published a useful rundown of recent works.