The publications of Simon Leys' books, The Emperor's New Clothes and Chinese Shadows have done much to demolish the pro-Chinese ideology in the West. Without the French ex-situationist Rene Vienet's ...

A review of The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, by Simon Leys; NYRB Classics, 576 pages, $19.95. In the first pages of The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays, Simon Leys asks us to ...

Simon Leys, the pseudonym of Pierre Ryckmans, is the author of "Chinese Shadows," "The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics" and "The Angel and the Octopus," a collection of essays ...

WRITERS choose pen names for many reasons. Pierre Ryckmans chose his—“Simon Leys”—to avoid being blacklisted by the Chinese authorities, who, he feared, would not appreciate his attempts to tell the ...

Despite the claims of the Maoist ruling elite of a complete break with feudal ways, Leys illustrates that the finely graded hierarchies of Maoist officialdom inherited and preserved the earlier ...

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Simon Leys ends his review of Francis Deron’s book The Trial of the Khmer Rouge (‘The Cambodian Genocide’, September) with an apparently unmotivated and irrelevant assault on the prominent French ...