Download or read book I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China written by Wen Zhu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation's increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen's fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often hedonistic individualism that is feverishly taking root. Set against the mundane landscapes of contemporary China-a worn Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital operating by dated socialist norms-Zhu Wen's stories zoom in on the often tragicomic minutiae of everyday life in this fast-changing country. With subjects ranging from provincial mafiosi to nightmarish families and oppressed factory workers, his claustrophobic narratives depict a spiritually bankrupt society, periodically rocked by spasms of uncontrolled violence. For example, I Love Dollars, a story about casual sex in a provincial city whose caustic portrayal of numb disillusionment and cynicism, caused an immediate sensation in the Chinese literary establishment when it was first published. The novella's loose, colloquial voice and sharp focus on the indignity and iniquity of a society trapped between communism and capitalism showcase Zhu Wen's exceptional ability to make literary sense of the bizarre, ideologically confused amalgam that is contemporary China. Julia Lovell's fluent translation deftly reproduces Zhu Wen's wry sense of humor and powerful command of detail and atmosphere. The first book-length publication of Zhu Wen's fiction in English, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China offers readers access to a trailblazing author and marks a major contribution to Chinese literature in English.
Download or read book I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China written by Wen Zhu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-16 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In five richly imaginative novellas and a short story, Zhu Wen depicts the violence, chaos, and dark comedy of China in the post-Mao era. A frank reflection of the seamier side of his nation's increasingly capitalist society, Zhu Wen's fiction offers an audaciously plainspoken account of the often hedonistic individualism that is feverishly taking root. Set against the mundane landscapes of contemporary China-a worn Yangtze River vessel, cheap diners, a failing factory, a for-profit hospital operating by dated socialist norms-Zhu Wen's stories zoom in on the often tragicomic minutiae of everyday life in this fast-changing country. With subjects ranging from provincial mafiosi to nightmarish families and oppressed factory workers, his claustrophobic narratives depict a spiritually bankrupt society, periodically rocked by spasms of uncontrolled violence. For example, I Love Dollars, a story about casual sex in a provincial city whose caustic portrayal of numb disillusionment and cynicism, caused an immediate sensation in the Chinese literary establishment when it was first published. The novella's loose, colloquial voice and sharp focus on the indignity and iniquity of a society trapped between communism and capitalism showcase Zhu Wen's exceptional ability to make literary sense of the bizarre, ideologically confused amalgam that is contemporary China. Julia Lovell's fluent translation deftly reproduces Zhu Wen's wry sense of humor and powerful command of detail and atmosphere. The first book-length publication of Zhu Wen's fiction in English, I Love Dollars and Other Stories of China offers readers access to a trailblazing author and marks a major contribution to Chinese literature in English.
Download or read book The Real Story of Ah Q and Other Tales of China written by Lu Xun and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-10-29 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lu Xun (Lu Hsun) is arguably the greatest writer of modern China, and is considered by many to be the founder of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun's stories both indict outdated Chinese traditions and embrace China's cultural richness and individuality. This volume presents brand-new translations by Julia Lovell of all of Lu Xun's stories, including 'The Real Story of Ah-Q', 'Diary of a Madman', 'A Comedy of Ducks', 'The Divorce' and 'A Public Example', among others. With an afterword by Yiyun Li.
Download or read book The Matchmaker the Apprentice and the Football Fan written by Wen Zhu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan moves between anarchic campuses, maddening communist factories, and the victims of China's economic miracle to showcase the absurdity, injustice, and socialist Gothic of everyday Chinese life. In "The Football Fan," readers fall in with an intriguingly unreliable narrator who may or may not have killed his elderly neighbor for a few hundred yuan. The bemused antihero of "Reeducation" is appalled to discover that, ten years after graduating during the pro-democracy protests of 1989, his alma mater has summoned him back for a punitive bout of political reeducation with a troublesome ex-girlfriend. "Da Ma's Way of Talking" is a fast, funny recollection of China's picaresque late 1980s, told through the life and times of one of our student narrator's more controversial classmates; while "The Apprentice" plunges us into the comic vexations of life in a more-or-less planned economy, as an enthusiastic young graduate is over-exercised by his table-tennis-fanatic bosses, deprived of sleep by gambling-addicted colleagues, and stuffed with hard-boiled eggs by an overzealous landlady. Full of acute observations, political bite, and piercing insight into friendships and romance, these stories further establish Zhu Wen as a fearless commentator on human nature and contemporary China.
Download or read book Made in China written by Anna Qu and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young girl forced to work in a Queens sweatshop calls child services on her mother in this powerful debut memoir about labor and self-worth that traces a Chinese immigrant's journey to an American future. As a teen, Anna Qu is sent by her mother to work in her family's garment factory in Queens. At home, she is treated as a maid and suffers punishment for doing her homework at night. Her mother wants to teach her a lesson: she is Chinese, not American, and such is their tough path in their new country. But instead of acquiescing, Qu alerts the Office of Children and Family Services, an act with consequences that impact the rest of her life. Nearly twenty years later, estranged from her mother and working at a Manhattan start-up, Qu requests her OCFS report. When it arrives, key details are wrong. Faced with this false narrative, and on the brink of losing her job as the once-shiny start-up collapses, Qu looks once more at her life's truths, from abandonment to an abusive family to seeking dignity and meaning in work. Traveling from Wenzhou to Xi'an to New York, Made in China is a fierce memoir unafraid to ask thorny questions about trauma and survival in immigrant families, the meaning of work, and the costs of immigration.
Download or read book Pacific Automobilism written by Gijs Mom and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 1002 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beginning of the 21st century has seen important shifts in mobility cultures around the world, as the West’s media-driven car culture has contrasted with existing local mobilities, from rickshaws in India and minibuses in Africa to cycling in China. In this expansive volume, historian Gijs Mom explores how contemporary mobility has been impacted by social, political, and economic forces on a global scale, as in light of local mobility cultures, the car as an ‘adventure machine’ seems to lose cultural influence in favor of the car’s status character.
Download or read book The Last Chinese Chef written by Nicole Mones and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2008 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exhilarating story is the transporting tale of how the sensual, romantic elements of haute Chinese cuisine become the perfect ingredients to lift the troubled soul of a grieving American woman.
Download or read book Dust and Other Stories written by T'aejun Yi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yi T’aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea’s true masters of the short story—and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as “one who went north,” Yi’s work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not lead him to a safe haven, however: though initially welcomed into the literary establishment, North Korea sent him into internal exile in the 1950s, and little is known of his fate. Dust and Other Stories offers a selection of Yi’s stories across time and place, showcasing a superb stylist caught up in the midst of his era’s most urgent ideological and aesthetic divides. This collection unites his earlier modernist masterpieces from the colonial era with his little-known work penned during North Korea’s founding years, offering a rare glimpse into the making—and crossing—of the border between south and north. During the turbulent final years of Japanese rule, Yi’s elegant yet subdued stories championed both his native tongue and the belief in the capacity of art. In the heavily politicized environment of the North, his later works maintain a faith in the art of storytelling and a concern for the disappearance of customs in the throes of modernization. Throughout both eras, Yi focused on ordinary people: old men struggling to understand a changing world, lovers meeting up among ancient ruins, a lively widow targeted by a literacy campaign, a bourgeois couple trying to sustain themselves during the war by breeding rabbits, and more. Magnificently translated by Janet Poole, Yi’s work bears witness to global turmoil with a melancholic sense of enduring beauty.
Download or read book Longing and Other Stories written by Jun'ichirō. Tanizaki and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki is one of the most eminent Japanese writers of the twentieth century, renowned for his investigations of family dynamics, eroticism, and cultural identity. Most acclaimed for his postwar novels such as The Makioka Sisters and The Key, Tanizaki made his literary debut in 1910. This book presents three powerful stories of family life from the first decade of Tanizaki’s career that foreshadow the themes the great writer would go on to explore. “Longing” recounts the fantastic journey of a precocious young boy through an eerie nighttime landscape. Replete with striking natural images and uncanny human encounters, it ends with a striking revelation. “Sorrows of a Heretic” follows a university student and aspiring novelist who lives in degrading poverty in a Tokyo tenement. Ambitious and tormented, the young man rebels against his family against a backdrop of sickness and death. “The Story of an Unhappy Mother” describes a vivacious but self-centered woman’s drastic transformation after a freak accident involving her son and daughter-in-law. Written in different genres, the three stories are united by a focus on mothers and sons and a concern for Japan’s traditional culture in the face of Westernization. The longtime Tanizaki translators Anthony H. Chambers and Paul McCarthy masterfully bring these important works to an Anglophone audience.
Download or read book River of Fire and Other Stories written by Chŏnghŭi O and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These nine stories range from O Chonghui's first published work in 1968 to one of her last publications in 1994. Her early stories are compact, often chilling accounts of family dysfunction, reflecting the decline of traditional, agrarian economics and the rise of urban, industrial living. Later stories are more expansive, weaving eloquent, occasionally wistful reflections on lost love and tradition together with provocative explorations of sexuality and gender.
Download or read book The Handsome Monk and Other Stories written by Tsering Dondrup and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tsering Döndrup is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors writing in Tibetan today. In a distinct voice rich in black humor and irony, he describes the lives of Tibetans in contemporary China with wit, empathy, and a passionate sense of justice. The Handsome Monk and Other Stories brings together short stories from across Tsering Döndrup’s career to create a panorama of Tibetan society. With a love for the sparse yet vivid language of traditional Tibetan life, Tsering Döndrup tells tales of hypocritical lamas, crooked officials, violent conflicts, and loyal yaks. His nomad characters find themselves in scenarios that are at once strange and familiar, satirical yet poignant. The stories are set in the fictional county of Tsezhung, where Tsering Döndrup’s characters live their lives against the striking backdrop of Tibet’s natural landscape and go about their daily business to the ever-present rhythms of Tibetan religious life. Tsering Döndrup confronts pressing issues: the corruption of religious institutions; the indignities and injustices of Chinese rule; poverty and social ills such as gambling and alcoholism; and the hardships of a minority group struggling to maintain its identity in the face of overwhelming odds. Ranging in style from playful updates of traditional storytelling techniques to narrative experimentation, Tsering Döndrup’s tales pay tribute to the resilience of Tibetan culture.
Download or read book The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn and Other Stories written by John Buchan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new selection of short stories by "the prince of thriller writers" (The Times, London) The short stories of John Buchan are known for their authentically rendered backgrounds, taut pacing, and atmosphere of expectancy and international intrigue. These diverse tales combine Buchan's remarkable experiences and interests as a traveler, war correspondent, politician, and classical scholar. Edited by acclaimed author Giles Foden, this selection features the World War I thriller "The Loathly Opposite," the frequently anthologized "Sing a Song of Sixpence," and "Streams of Water in the South," one of Buchan's personal favorites. Addressing such themes as human frailty, strength, and redemption, the stories testify to Buchan's worldview that mastery of oneself leads to the fulfillment of one's destiny.
Download or read book Short Stories in Chinese written by John Balcom and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dual-language edition of Chinese stories—many appearing in English for the first time This new volume of eight short stories offers students at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature from the world’s most spoken language, without having to constantly to refer back to a dictionary. The stories—many of which appear here in English for the first time—are by well-known writers as well as emerging voices. From a story by Li Rui about the honest simplicity of a Shanxi farmer to one by Ma Yuan exposing the seamy underside of contemporary urban society, they are infused with both rural dialect and urban slang and feature a wide range of styles and points of view. Complete with notes, the stories make excellent reading in either language. Note: For each short story in this eBook edition, the full English translation is followed by its original Chinese text.
Download or read book Translating Chinese Fiction written by Tan Yesheng and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the cognitive translatological paradigm, this book introduces a situation-embedded cognitive construction model of translation and explores the thinking portfolios of British and American sinologists-cum-translators to re-examine their multiple voices and cognition in translating Chinese fiction. By placing sinologists-cum-translators in the same discourse space, the study transcends the limitations of previous case studies and offers a comprehensive cognitive panorama of how Chinese novels are rendered. The author explores the challenges and difficulties of translating Chinese fiction from the insider perspectives of British and American sinologists, and cross-validates their multiple voices by aligning them with cross-cultural communication scenarios. Based on the cognitive construction model of translation, the book provides a systematic review of the translation thoughts and ideas of the community of sinologists in terms of linguistic conventions, narrative styles, contextual and cultural frames, readership categories and metaphorical models of translation. It envisions a new research path to enhance empirical research on translators' cognition in a dynamic translation ecosystem. The title will be an essential read for students and scholars of translation studies and Chinese studies. It will also appeal to translators and researchers interested in cognitive stylistics, literary studies and intercultural communication studies.
Download or read book Stealth War written by Robert Spalding and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China expert Robert Spalding reveals the shocking success China has had infiltrating American institutions and compromising our national security. The media often suggest that Russia poses the greatest threat to America's national security, but the real danger lies farther east. While those in power have been distracted and disorderly, China has waged a six-front war on America's economy, military, diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure--and they're winning. It's almost too late to undo the shocking, though nearly invisible, victories of the Chinese. In Stealth War, retired Air Force Brigadier General Robert Spalding reveals China's motives and secret attacks on the West. Chronicling how our leaders have failed to protect us over recent decades, he provides shocking evidence of some of China's most brilliant ploys, including: Placing Confucius Institutes in universities across the United States that serve to monitor and control Chinese students on campus and spread communist narratives to unsuspecting American students. Offering enormous sums to American experts who create investment funds that funnel technology to China. Signing a thirty-year agreement with the US that allows China to share peaceful nuclear technology, ensuring that they have access to American nuclear know-how. Spalding's concern isn't merely that America could lose its position on the world stage. More urgently, the Chinese Communist Party has a fundamental loathing of the legal protections America grants its people and seeks to create a world without those rights. Despite all the damage done so far, Spalding shows how it's still possible for the U.S. and the rest of the free world to combat--and win--China's stealth war.
Download or read book China Dolls written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1938 and the exclusive Oriental nightclub in San Francisco's Forbidden City is holding auditions for showgirls. In the dark, scandalous glamour of the club, three girls from very different backgrounds stumble into each other lives. All the girls have secrets. Grace, an American-born Chinese girl, has fled the Midwest and an abusive father. Helen is from a Chinese family which has deep roots in San Francisco's Chinatown. And, as both her friends know, Ruby is Japanese passing as Chinese. Then, in a heartbeat, everything changes. The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and paranoia, suspicion, and a shocking act of betrayal, threaten to destroy their lives.
Download or read book The Reincarnated Giant written by Mingwei Song and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new wave of Chinese science fiction is here. This golden age has not only resurrected the genre but also subverted its own conventions. Going beyond political utopianism and technological optimism, contemporary Chinese writers conjure glittering visions and subversive experiments—ranging from space opera to cyberpunk, utopianism to the posthuman, and parodies of China’s rise to deconstructions of the myth of national development. This anthology showcases the best of contemporary science fiction from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. In fifteen short stories and novel excerpts, The Reincarnated Giant opens a doorway into imaginary realms alongside our own world and the history of the future. Authors such as Lo Yi-chin, Dung Kai-cheung, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, and the Hugo winner Liu Cixin—some alive during the Cultural Revolution, others born in the 1980s—blur the boundaries between realism and surrealism, between politics and technology. They tell tales of intergalactic war; decoding the last message sent from an extinct human race; the use of dreams as tools to differentiate cyborgs and humans; poets’ strange afterlife inside a supercomputer; cannibalism aboard an airplane; and unchecked development that leads to uncontrollable catastrophe. At a time when the Chinese government promotes the “Chinese dream,” the dark side of the new wave shows a nightmarish unconscious. The Reincarnated Giant is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of the genre.
