Howard Goldblatt

Sylvia Li-chun Lin

Feiyu Bi

Growing up in a post-Cultural Revolution-era Chinese village, three sisters among seven strive to change the course of their destinies by embracing respective views about dignity, seduction, and ambition.

Three Sisters

Jiang Rong

In the 1960s on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen undertakes a spiritual journey into the world of the nomadic Mongols, a dying culture that honors the endangered Mongolian wolf and follows a philosophy about maintaining a balance with nature.

Wolf Totem

Alai

A lively and cinematic twentieth-century epic, Red Poppies focuses on the extravagant and brutal reign of a clan of Tibetan warlords during the rise of Chinese Communism. The story is wryly narrated by the chieftain's son, a self-professed "idiot" who reveals the bloody feuds, seductions, secrets, and scheming behind his family's struggles for power. When the chieftain agrees to grow opium poppies with seeds supplied by the Chinese Nationalists in exchange for modern weapons, he draws Tibet into the opium trade -- and unwittingly plants the seeds for a downfall. A "swashbuckling novel" (New York Times Book Review), Red Poppies is at once a political parable and a moving elegy to the lost kingdom of Tibet in all its cruelty, beauty, and romance.

Red Poppies

Joseph S. M. Lau

An anthology of Chinese fiction, poetry, and essays written during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature

Mo Yan

The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands, and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences. The Garlic Ballads is a powerful vision of life under the heel of an inflexible and uncaring government. It is also a delicate story of love between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend—and the struggle to maintain that love despite overwhelming obstacles.

A Novel

The Garlic Ballads

Showcasing twenty young writers, an anthology of new Chinese fiction features Chinese writers breaking free from oppression and uniformity and includes stories by Mo Yan, author of "Red Sorghum" and Su Tong, who wrote "Raise the Red Lantern"

Fiction from Today's China

Chairman Mao Would Not be Amused

Jintong, his mother, and his eight sisters struggle to survive through the major crises of twentieth century China, which include civil war, invasion by the Japanese, the cultural revolution, and communist rule in the new China.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips

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 Fourth Congress of Writers and Artists

Chinese Literature for the 1980s

Jicai Feng

Chi-tsʻai Feng

Tells the story of Fragrant Lotus, whose feet were bound in the Grand Lotus style when she was six years old and now enable her to marry into a wealthy family

The Three-inch Golden Lotus

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

Recent Chinese Writing and Its Audiences

Worlds Apart

A Guide to Its Study and Appreciation : Essays and Bibliographies

Modern Chinese Fiction

Yan Mo

"In Change, China's foremost novelist Mo Yan personalizes the social and political changes in his country over the past few decades in a novella disguised as autobiography (or vice versa). Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of 'people's history', a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, the author breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen."--

Change

Compilation of 14 articles on the Fourth Congresses and 2 articles on the Third Congress translated from various sources by different translators.

The Fourth Congress of Writers & Artists

Aili Mu

Julie Chiu

"If sparrows are but a metaphor, every writer faces the challenge of reality, which is to say, how one catches this sparrow." So writes Bei Dao in his preface to Loud Sparrows, a spirited collection of ninety-one short-shorts, an exciting new form of extreme short-storytelling that has swept the creative consciousness of mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The artistic and aesthetic freedoms of short-shorts enable writers to capture the tone, texture, and chaos of their rapidly changing societies in infinitely inventive ways. Written by Chinese authors over the past three decades, the stories in this anthology are culled from newspapers, magazines, literary journals, and personal collections, and their subjects range from humanist ideals and traditional virtues to the material benefits of a commercialized society.

Howard Goldblatt

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