Mo Yan, China's most critically acclaimed author, has changed the face of his country's contemporary literature with such daring and masterly novels as Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads, and The Republic of Wine. In this collection of eight astonishing stories--the title story of which has been adapted to film by the award-winning director of Red Sorghum Zhang Yimou--Mo Yan shows why he is also China's leading writer of short fiction.
His passion for writing shaped by his own experience of almost unimaginable poverty as a child, Mo Yan uses his talent to expose the harsh abuses of an oppressive society. In these stories he writes of those who suffer, physically and spiritually, under its yoke: the newly unemployed factory worker who hits upon an ingenious financial opportunity; two former lovers revisiting their passion fleetingly before returning to their spouses; young couples willing to pay for a place to share their love in private; the abandoned baby brought home by a soldier to his unsympathetic wife; the impoverished child who must subsist on a diet of iron and steel; the young bride willing to go to any length to escape an odious, arranged marriage. Never didactic, Mo's fiction ranges from tragedy to wicked satire, rage to whimsy, magical fable to harsh realism, from impassioned pleas on behalf of struggling workers to paeans to romantic love.

A beautiful new translation of beloved Chinese author Lao She's masterpiece of social realism, about the misadventures of a poor Beijing rickshaw driver

First published in China in 1937, "Rickshaw Boy" is the story of Xiangzi, an honest and serious country boy who works as a rickshaw puller in Beijing. A man of simple needs whose greatest ambition is to one day own his own rickshaw, Xiangzi is nonetheless thwarted, time and again, in his attempts to improve his lot in life.

One of the most important and popular works of twentieth-century Chinese literature, "Rickshaw Boy" is an unflinchingly honest, darkly comic look at a life on the margins of society and a searing indictment of the philosophy of individualism.

A lame joke can be a crushing experience The people of Yanjin know to always have a few jokes on hand. For three thousand years, they have been terrorised by Hua Erniang, a forsaken spirit that rules over their dreams. Failing to amuse this supernatural guest means not waking up at all, crushed by her jilted heart which has calcified into a mountain. Growing up inside a town adapting to socialist ideals, Mingliang’s life is beset with hardship and adversity that leaves his family in tatters. Seeking fortune elsewhere, he heads west across China's vast central plain, encountering nothing but restless souls mortgaged to debts from former lives, each unwilling to move on for their own reasons. No matter how many times you try to start afresh, you can only run so far from a broken home. Some wounds take more than a lifetime to heal, but in the meantime, a few wisecracks tucked into the back pocket won’t hurt.

Editor Howard Goldblatt explains that while most societies analyse and revere their literary trends in retrospect, post-Liberation China's literary trends tend to be announced beforehand allowing for critics to judge how close or far from the prescribed norms a piece of art is. In this volume, a collection of speeches and reports from the Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists, well-known Chinese writers (novels, poets, and dramatists alike) debate the future direction of Chinese literature for the 1980s. Originally published in 1982, the book lends a contemporary view into the state of art and literature in China during a critical era of transformation. This title is suitable for students of Literature and East Asian Studies.

"Brilliant, lyrical, and bawdy."—The San Francisco Chronicle. Red Sorghum chronicles the chaotic years before the first World War, when China warred with Japan.

WINNER OF THE 2010 MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE Three sisters struggle to change the course of their destinies in a China that does not belong to them. Yumi uses her dignity, Yuxiu her seductive charms, and Yuyang her desire for success. This breathtaking story vividly captures the all-consuming desire for power in a society obsessed with saving face. Whether it's in the Wang family village, where lift is attuned to the rhythm of work and the slogans of the Cultural Revolution, or in urban China of the 1980s, the sisters are not prepared to be just another wave in the 'infinite ocean of people'.

This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan is an elegiac novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts-and music: "A delightful read."-Ha Jin A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei's red-light district to snow-clad New York. At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. But he was once a musical prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness? Long hailed in Taiwan as a "writer's writer," Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. It's a book of sounds: both of music and of the heart, from Rachmaninoff to Schubert, from Glenn Gould to Sviatoslav Richter, from untapped potential to unrequited love. With a cadence and precision that bring to mind Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, this short novel may be a portrait of the artist as a "failure," but it also describes a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love.

Thirteen selected papers from an international conference on contemporary Chinese literature held near Gunzburg, Bavaria, in June-July 1986 constitute both a record of literary writings from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, as well as an overview of the broader international role of Chinese writing i

Frog is a richly complex new novel about China's one-child policy by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012. Gugu is beautiful, charismatic and of an unimpeachable political background. A respected midwife, she combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family-planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself. Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply-rooted social values. Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country's modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan's taut and engrossing examination of Chinese life will be read for generations to come. 'Mo Yan deserves a place in world literature. His voice will find its way into the heart of the reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have' Amy Tan 'One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity' Time 'His idiom has the spiralling invention of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie'Observer Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Liu Heng is one of contemporary China's most acclaimed and masterful writers, and with Green River Daydreams he has written "of the struggle between Western ideas and the old political system, all of it set against a supplely portrayed mountain and river landscape" (NPR's All Things Considered). Ears, the slave of a wealthy landowning family in the early twentieth century, bears witness to its spectacular corruption and decline. The family's prodigal son, Guanghan, returns from four years of study in Europe with a French engineer friend and a dream of starting a collectively run match factory, but has little interest in the bride his family has arranged for him. Her beauty and good heart have not gone unnoticed by Ears, however -- nor has her growing closeness to the Frenchman. Meanwhile, clashes between the Qing imperialists and the resistance are quickly becoming bloody -- and Guanghan's iconoclastic ideas do not remain free of suspicion for long. "[B]oth a coming-of-age story and a chronicle of the clash between forbidden love and duty." -- Publishers Weekly "A richly detailed realistic saga" -- Kirkus Reviews "A masterly blending of character and story in a compelling historical setting.... Highly recommended." -- Tom Cooper, Library Journal (starred review)

Daughter of the River is a memoir of China unlike any other. Born during the Great Famine of the early 1960s and raised in the slums of Chongqing, Hong Ying was constantly aware of hunger and the sacrifices required to survive. As she neared her eighteenth birthday, she became determined to unravel the secrets that left her an outsider in her own family. At the same time, a history teacher at her school began to awaken her sense of justice and her emerging womanhood. Hong Ying's wrenching coming-of-age would teach her the price of taking a stand and show her the toll of totalitarianism, poverty, and estrangement on her family. With raw intensity and fearless honesty, Daughter of the River follows China's trajectory through one woman's life, from the Great Famine through the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.

In 1989 a remarkable film, Ju Dou, banned in China for depicting adultery, was released to worldwide acclaim and nominated for an Academy Award. The film was adapted from the first novel by Liu Heng, one of China's most important young writers. Black Snow is Liu Heng's second novel, and it will prove to be equally unsettling. Li Huiquan returns to Beijing after serving a three-year sentence in a prison labor camp for his involvement in a juvenile street fight. Both his foster parents, who raised him after he was discovered abandoned in a train station, are dead, and Huiquan is left with nothing but his mother's small life's savings and the attentions of his Auntie Luo, who arranges for his livelihood. Huiquan agrees, with his aunt's urgings, to sell clothing from a peddler's cart. It is joyless, tiring work, and Huiquan can barely contain his disdain for the crowds of people eager to snatch up foreign goods. At night, Huiquan frequents a karaoke bar, where he meets a bearded stranger with connections to the shady world of the black market, a world Huiquan finds both seductive and repulsive. He also meets Zhao Yaqiu, a naive and silly young singer who becomes the object of his overwhelming obsession and the focus of his previously diffuse anxiety. As his surroundings turn increasingly bleak and meaningless, Huiquan's attraction to Yaqiu, who, in his mind, may provide the only connection to the society around him, grows dangerously strong. Black Snow is a stunning psychological portrait of a dissatisfied and emotionally illiterate young man's desperate search for meaning and companionship in the gray world under totalitarianism. It combines the existential angst of writers such as Camusand Sartre with the disaffection of the American urban novels of the 1980s. Liu Heng's voice is one of the first of his generation to be heard outside of China, and this novel offers an extraordinary glimpse into the psyche and life-style of the young generation in contemporary Beijing.

Editor Howard Goldblatt explains that while most societies analyse and revere their literary trends in retrospect, post-Liberation China's literary trends tend to be announced beforehand allowing for critics to judge how close or far from the prescribed norms a piece of art is. In this volume, a collection of speeches and reports from the Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists, well-known Chinese writers (novels, poets, and dramatists alike) debate the future direction of Chinese literature for the 1980s. Originally published in 1982, the book lends a contemporary view into the state of art and literature in China during a critical era of transformation. This title is suitable for students of Literature and East Asian Studies.

The peasants of Paradise County in China have been eking out an existence virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, until a glut on the garlic market forces them to watch the crop that is their lifeblood wilt, rot and blacken in the fields - leading them to storm the seat of corrupt Communist officialdom in an apocalyptic riot. Against this heroic backdrop unfold three intricately interwoven tales of love, loyalty and retribution: between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend. Banned in China following Tianamen Square, "The Garlic Ballads" is a bawdy, mystical and brawling novel that portrays a landscape at once strange and utterly compelling, and a people whose fierce passions overflow the rigid confines of their traditions.

Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle both the Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. As the novel opens, a group of villagers, led by Commander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; but as Yu's wife returns through the sorghum fields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she is killed. Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present and the narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, the fighting between the Chinese warlords and his family's history.

A man who has come from nothing, from poverty and loss, finds himself a beautiful wife, his dream love. When she vanishes without a trace, he sets up a small cafe in her favourite spot on the edge of the South China Sea, hoping she'll return. Instead, he is confronted by the man he suspects may be responsible for everything he has suffered: Luo Yiming, a prominent businessman and philanthropist who holds the small town in his sway. In the few moments the two men spend together, Luo is driven mad. So begins a story of desire and betrayal set against the tumultuous first decade of Taiwan's 21st Century. The recipient of all three of Taiwan's major literary prizes, My Enemy's Cherry Tree is a story of love, money and coercion, in which two men who have sought to acquire something unattainable, instead lose something irreplaceable.

"The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature" has long been a definitive resource for Chinese literature in translation, offering a complete overview of twentieth-century writing from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and making inroads into the twenty-first century as well. In this new edition Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt have selected fresh works from familiar authors and have augmented the collection with poetry, stories from the colonial period in Taiwan, literature by Tibetan authors, samplings from the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution, stories by post-Mao authors Wang Anyi and Gao Xingjian, literature with a homosexual theme, and examples from the modern "cruel youth" movement. Lau and Goldblatt have also updated their notes and their biographies of featured writers and poets. Now fully up to date, this critical resource more than ever provides readers with a thorough introduction to Chinese society and culture.

Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores the residential lanes and courtyards behind Shanghai's busy shopping streets, the less she wants to return to the country as a dutiful wife. As Fu Ping wavers over her future, she learns the city through the stories of the nannies, handymen, and garbage collectors whose labor is bringing life and bustle back to postwar Shanghai. Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People's Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary China's most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban life. In shifting perspectives rich in detail and psychological insight, she sketches their aspirations, their fears, and the subtle ties that bind them together. In Howard Goldblatt's masterful translation, Fu Ping reveals Wang Anyi's precise renderings of history, class, and the human heart.

The Lost Garden is an eloquent portrait of the losses incurred as we struggle to hold on to our passions. The novel begins with the family of Zhu Yinghong, whose father, Zhu Zuyan, was imprisoned in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek's rule. Zhu Zuyan spends his days luxuriating in his Lotus Garden, which he builds according to his own desires. Forever under suspicion, he indulges as much as he can in circumscribed pleasures, though they drain the family fortune. Eventually the entire household is sold, including the Lotus Garden. The novel then swings to modern-day Taipei, where Zhu Yinghong falls for Lin Xigeng, a real estate tycoon and playboy. Their cat-and-mouse courtship builds against the extravagant banquets and decadent entertainments of Taipei's wealthy businessmen. Though the two ultimately marry, their high-styled romance dulls over time, leading to a dangerous, desperate quest to reclaim the enchantment of the Lotus Garden.

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Tofu peddler Yang Baishun is a man of few words and few friends. Unable to find meaningful companionship, he settles for a marriage of convenience. When his wife leaves him for another man he is left to care for his five-year-old stepdaughter Qiaoling, who is subsequently kidnapped, never to be seen by Yang again. Seventy years later we find Niu Aiguo, who, like Yang, struggles to connect with other people. As Niu begins learning about his recently deceased mother's murky past it becomes clear that Qiaoling is the mysterious bond that links Yang and Niu. Originally published in China in 2009 and appearing in English for the first time, Liu Zhenyun's award-winning Someone to Talk To highlights the contours of everyday life in pre- and post-Mao China, where regular people struggle to make a living and establish homes and families. Meditating on connection and loneliness, community and family, Someone to Talk To traces the unexpected and far-reaching ramifications of seemingly inconsequential actions, while reminding us all of the importance of communication.

Extremely short stories-known as short-shorts-have become a global phenomenon, but nowhere have they been embraced as enthusiastically as in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The form's artistic and aesthetic freedoms allow authors to capture the tone, texture, and chaos of their rapidly changing societies in infinitely inventive ways. Fragments and contingencies reveal unofficial histories, undocumented memories, and the trials of everyday individuals, and the genre's lean format is a welcome antidote to a culture characterized by rampant excess. Loud Sparrows is a spirited collection of ninety-one short-shorts written by Chinese authors over the past three decades. Presenting diverse voices and perspectives by writers both well known and new to the art, the stories are culled from newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and personal collections. Their subjects range from the mundane to the sublime and illuminate everything from humanist ideals to traditional virtues to the material benefits of a commercialized society. The anthology is organized into thematic categories such as Change, Creatures, (In)fidelities, Grooming, Governance, Nourishment, and Weirdness, and includes notes to better understand the genre. Each section is introduced by an original piece of flash fiction written by Howard Goldblatt. The short-short, to borrow a Chinese saying, is "small as a sparrow but has all the vital organs" of a good story. Loud Sparrows offers a comprehensive introduction to a unique literary genre that has revolutionized world literature.