A brilliant new translation of the short improvisational fiction and memoirs of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature. This captivating translation assembles two volumes by Lu Xun, the founder of modern Chinese literature and one of East Asia's most important thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century. Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk represent a pinnacle of achievement alongside Lu Xun's famed short stories. In Wild Grass, a collection of twenty-three experimental pieces, surreal scenes come alive through haunting language and vivid imagery. These are landscapes populated by ghosts, talking animals, and sentient plants, where a protagonist might come face-to-face with their own corpse. By depicting the common struggle of real and imagined creatures to survive in an inhospitable world, Lu Xun asks the deceptively simple question, "What does it mean to be human?" Alongside Wild Grass is Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk, a memoir in eight essays capturing the literary master's formative years and featuring a motley cast of dislocated characters-children, servants, outcasts, the dead and the dying. Giving voice to vulnerable subjects and depicting their hopes and despair as they negotiate an unforgiving existence, Morning Blossoms affirms the value of all beings and elucidates a central predicament of the human condition: feeling without a home in the world. Beautifully translated and introduced by Eileen J. Cheng, these lyrical texts blur the line between autobiography and literary fiction. Together the two collections provide a new window into Lu Xun's mind and his quest to find beauty and meaning in a cruel and unjust world.

Lu Xun (1881-1936) is widely considered the greatest writer of twentieth-century China. Although primarily known for his two slim volumes of short fiction, he was a prolific and inventive essayist. Jottings under Lamplight showcases Lu Xun's versatility as a master of prose forms and his brilliance as a cultural critic with translations of sixty-two of his essays, twenty of which are translated here for the first time. While a medical student in Tokyo, Lu Xun viewed a photographic slide that purportedly inspired his literary calling: it showed the decapitation of a Chinese man by a Japanese soldier, as Chinese bystanders watched apathetically. He felt that what his countrymen needed was a cure not for their physical ailments but for their souls. Autobiographical accounts describing this and other formative life experiences are included in Jottings, along with a wide variety of cultural commentaries, from letters, speeches, and memorials to parodies and treatises. Lu Xun was remarkably well versed in Chinese tradition and playfully manipulated its ancient forms. But he also turned away from historical convention, experimenting with new literary techniques and excoriating the "slave mentality" of a population paralyzed by Confucian hierarchies. Tinged at times with notes of despair, yet also with pathos, humor, and an unparalleled caustic wit, Lu Xun's essays chronicle the tumultuous transformations of his own life and times, providing penetrating insights into Chinese culture and society.

Lu Xun (1881–1936), arguably twentieth-century China’s leading writer, is often depicted as the quintessential representative of May Fourth iconoclastic spirit. Yet his work reflects the ambivalence and contradictions of the larger questions that preoccupied him as a writer and intellectual: How can a culture estranged from its traditions come to terms with its past? How can a culture, severed from its customs and beliefs and alienated from the foreign conventions it attempts to appropriate, conceptualise its own present and future? Challenging conventional depictions, Eileen Cheng demonstrates how Lu Xun’s aesthetic experiments are at once much more traditional and revolutionary than previously recognised. Literary Remains reveals how Lu Xun’s own literary encounter with the modern involved a sustained engagement with the past. Filled with images of death and decay, his creative writing simultaneously represents and mirrors the trauma of cultural disintegration in content and form. His wide range of literary experiments actively engage the conventions of traditional literature, while his narratives—contradictory, uncertain, and at times incoherent—refuse to apprehend the world through canonised precepts or teleological notions of history, opening up imaginative possibilities of comprehending the past and present without necessarily reifying them. Behind Lu Xun’s “refusal to mourn,” that is, his insistence on keeping the past and the dead alive in his work, lies an ethical claim: a bid to recover the redemptive meaning of loss. Like a solitary wanderer keeping vigil at a site of destruction, he sifts through the debris, composing epitaphs to mark both the presence and absence of that which has gone before and will soon come to pass. In the rubble of what remains, he recovers gems of illumination through which to assess, critique, and transform the moment of the present. Lu Xun’s literary enterprise was driven by a “radical hope” that his writings might capture glimmers of the past and the present and illuminate a future yet to unfold. Literary Remains will appeal to a wide audience of scholars interested in Lu Xun, modern China, and world literature.|Lu Xun (1881–1936), arguably twentieth-century China’s leading writer, is often depicted as the quintessential representative of May Fourth iconoclastic spirit. Yet his work reflects the ambivalence and contradictions of the larger questions that preoccupied him as a writer and intellectual: How can a culture estranged from its traditions come to terms with its past? How can a culture, severed from its customs and beliefs and alienated from the foreign conventions it attempts to appropriate, conceptualise its own present and future? Challenging conventional depictions, Eileen Cheng demonstrates how Lu Xun’s aesthetic experiments are at once much more traditional and revolutionary than previously recognised. Literary Remains reveals how Lu Xun’s own literary encounter with the modern involved a sustained engagement with the past. Filled with images of death and decay, his creative writing simultaneously represents and mirrors the trauma of cultural disintegration in content and form. His wide range of literary experiments actively engage the conventions of traditional literature, while his narratives—contradictory, uncertain, and at times incoherent—refuse to apprehend the world through canonised precepts or teleological notions of history, opening up imaginative possibilities of comprehending the past and present without necessarily reifying them. Behind Lu Xun’s “refusal to mourn,” that is, his insistence on keeping the past and the dead alive in his work, lies an ethical claim: a bid to recover the redemptive meaning of loss. Like a solitary wanderer keeping vigil at a site of destruction, he sifts through the debris, composing epitaphs to mark both the presence and absence of that which has gone before and will soon come to pass. In the rubble of what remains, he recovers gems of illumination through which to assess, critique, and transform the moment of the present. Lu Xun’s literary enterprise was driven by a “radical hope” that his writings might capture glimmers of the past and the present and illuminate a future yet to unfold. Literary Remains will appeal to a wide audience of scholars interested in Lu Xun, modern China, and world literature.