Download or read book Lenin s Kisses written by Yan Lianke and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “blistering satire” of modern China was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and a New York Times Editor’s Choice novel (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Lenin’s Kisses is set in modern day China, in the village of Liven. Nestled within the Balou Mountains, the people have enough food and leisure to be content—until their crops and livelihood are obliterated by a snowstorm in the middle of summer. Then a county official arrives with a peculiar plan. He wants to use the villagers to start a traveling performance troupe. Next, he’ll take the profits and buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russia and install it in a mausoleum to attract tourism. But the success of the Shuanghuai County Special-Skills Performance Troupe comes at a serious price. Named a finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, Lenin’s Kisses is “a satirical masterpiece” (Kirkus) that was on Best Book of 2012 lists from the New Yorker, MacLeans, and Kirkus, and was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Download or read book Lenin s Kisses written by Yan Lianke and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An absurdist masterpiece. A provocative and bitingly humourous tragicomedy of greed and corruption. Lenin's Kisses is a brilliant novel about modern China. Blind, deaf, and disfigured, the 197 citizens of the Village of Liven enjoy a peaceful lifestyle, spared from the government's watchful eye. But when an unseasonal snowstorm wipes out the grain crops, a county official convinces the villagers to set up a travelling freak-show showcasing their disabilities. With the money, he intends to buy Lenin's embalmed corpse from Russia and install it in a mausoleum in the mountains to attract tourism to the sleepy district. Lenin's Kisses is a rollicking tragicomedy with a cast of moving characters, a cautionary tale of the all-consuming desire for power and wealth from one of China's most respected and celebrated writers. Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Text has published his novels Serve the People! and Dream of Ding Village, which was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Lianke has won two of China's most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Prize and the Lao She Award. He lives in Bejing. textpublishing.com.au 'The novel's depth lies in its ability to express an unbearable sorrow, even while constantly making he reader laugh out loud...a truly miraculous novel.' Hong Kong Ming Pao Weekly 'Yan Lianke sees and describes his characters with great tenderness...this talented and sensitive writer exposes the absurdity of our time.' La Croix 'Yan Lianke weaves a passionate satire of today's China, a marvellous circus where the one-eyed-man is king...Brutal. And wickedly funny.' L'Express 'Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real, raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and tears.' Ha Jin 'Both a blistering satire and a bruising saga, this epic novel by Yan examines the grinding forces of communism and capitalism, and the volatile zone where the two intersect...A heartbreaking story of greed, corruption, and the dangers of utopia.' Publishers Weekly (starred review) 'Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Gunter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and you're in the approximate territory of Lianke's latest exercise in epatering the powers that be...A satirical masterpiece.' Kirkus Reviews

Download or read book The Years Months Days written by Yan Lianke and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2017-12-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last decade, Yan Lianke has been continually heralded as one of the “best contemporary Chinese writers” (The Independent) and “one of the country’s fiercest satirists” (The Guardian). Among many awards and honors, he has been twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and he was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for his impressive body of work. Now, for the first time, his two most acclaimed novellas are being published in English. “Timeless” and “marvelous” (Asian Review of Books), Marrow is a haunting story of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four physically and mentally disabled children. When she finds out that bones “the closer from kin the better” can cure their illnesses and prevent future generations from the same fate, she feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband. But after running out of bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take. A luminous, moving fable, The Years, Months, Days—a bestselling classic in China and winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize—tells of an elderly man who stays in his small village after a terrible drought forces everyone to leave. Unable to make the grueling march through the mountains, he becomes the lone inhabitant, along with a blind dog. Tending to a single ear of corn, and fending off the natural world from overtaking the village, every day is a victory over death. With touches of the fantastical, these two novellas—masterpieces of the form—reflect the universality of mankind’s will to live, live well, and live with purpose.

Download or read book The Four Books written by Yan Lianke and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-25 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Yan Lianke's most powerful novel yet. Reminiscent of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Darkness at Noon, Yan's mythical tale portrays the grotesque persecution during the Great Leap Forward. In the ninety-ninth district of a labour camp, the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian and Technician undergo re-education, to restore their revolutionary zeal. In charge of this process is the Child, who delights in enforcing draconian rules. The Four Books tells the story of one of China's most controversial periods. It also reveals the power of camaraderie, love and faith against oppression in the darkest possible times. Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Text has published his novels Serve the People!, Lenin’s Kisses and Dream of Ding Village, which was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Yan Lianke won the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize in 2013. He has also won two of China's most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Prize and the Lao She Award. In 2014, he won the Franz Kafka Prize. He lives in Bejing. 'Author Yan's deft satire, comic touches and his endless compassion bring smiles and tears through a journey that swings effortlessly back and forward between the absurd, the real and moments of magic. It is an epic tale of how grand, event if well-meant, plans can be tarnished by greed and unhappiness. It cautions against being consumed by power. Here is a splendid storyteller in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. Yan's writing is masterful, his imagination and his satire soars above the common.' Courier Mail 'Yan's postmodern cartoon of the Communist dream caving to run-amok capitalism is fiendishly clever, in parodying the conventions of fables and historical scholarship. The ghost of another famous dead Russian, Nikolai Gogol, hovers over the proceedings in spirit, if not in economy of means.' New York Times 'Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that “reality and satire are the same".' New Yorker 'Whimsical and horrifying by turns...a no-holds-barred satirical allegory of recent Chinese history.' Listener, NZ ‘Yan Lianke weaves a passionate satire of today’s China, a marvellous circus where the one-eyed-man is king...Brutal. And wickedly funny.' L'Express ‘Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, and you’re in the approximate territory of Lianke’s latest exercise in épatering the powers that be...A satirical masterpiece.’ Kirkus ‘Both a blistering satire and a bruising saga, this epic novel examines the grinding forces of communism and capitalism, and the volatile zone where the two intersect...A heartbreaking story of greed, corruption, and the dangers of utopia.’ Publishers Weekly ‘This epic tragicomedy deftly satirises the exploitation of the Chinese people by greedy, power-hungry and inept officials. Yan Lianke showcases many talents of his own, including brilliant absurdist humour and self-censorship.’ North and South, NZ ‘For once, the hype doesn’t go far enough...a devastating, brilliant slice of history.’ Times ‘Woven together, these “texts” reflect the catastrophe of the times and meditate on the meaning of integrity, truth, love and ethics when confronted with horror...[Lianke] has produced an extraordinary novel.’ Guardian ‘A compelling account of the absurdities of the tragedy that killed an estimated 30 million people.’ North and South

Download or read book Red Legacies in China written by Jie Li and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-26 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has contemporary China inherited from its revolutionary past? How do the realities and memories, aesthetics and practices of the Mao era still reverberate in the post-Mao cultural landscape? The essays in this volume propose “red legacies” as a new critical framework from which to examine the profusion of cultural productions and afterlives of the communist revolution in order to understand China’s continuities and transformations from socialism to postsocialism. Organized into five parts—red foundations, red icons, red classics, red bodies, and red shadows—the book’s interdisciplinary contributions focus on visual and performing arts, literature and film, language and thought, architecture, museums, and memorials. Mediating at once unfulfilled ideals and unmourned ghosts across generations, red cultural legacies suggest both inheritance and debt, and can be mobilized to support as well as to critique the status quo.

Download or read book Dream of Ding Village written by Yan Lianke and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant and harrowing novel” about a deadly epidemic fueled by corruption, based on real-life events in China (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, Dream of Ding Village is based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China. The novel is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan Lianke, who worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. Whole villages were wiped out with no responsibility taken or reparations paid. Dream of Ding Village focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the party pile as he exploits the situation, while another son is infected and dies. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing and what happens to those who get in the way. “Lianke confronts the black market blood trade and the subsequent AIDS epidemic it sparked, in a brilliant and harrowing novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Download or read book Hard Like Water written by Yan Lianke and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-06-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The new masterpiece by eminent Chinese writer Yan Lianke . . . two revolutionaries take matters disastrously into their own hands while conducting a crazed affair' MARGARET ATWOOD on Twitter A breakneck adventure story following the erotic love affair of party cadres Aijun and Hongmei during China's Cultural Revolution This is the story of the freewheeling love affair between married soldier Aijun and Hongmei, a beautiful young woman from his village in the Balou Mountains. Intoxicated with one another, Aijun and Hongmei hurl themselves into their town's revolutionary struggle. Spending their days and nights stamping out feudalism, writing pamphlets and organising rallies, they become inseparable: they are the engines of history. But as their political activity reaches new heights, so does the danger of getting caught... 'A blistering tour-de-force... Sensuous and riveting' MADELEINE THIEN, Booker-shortlisted author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing 'Fascinating... This tale of an illicit tryst during the Cultural Revolution is a stinging satire' The Times **A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST FICTION IN TRANSLATION BOOK 2021**

Download or read book The Explosion Chronicles written by Yan Lianke and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-17 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The village of Explosion was founded more than a millennium ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era the name takes on a new significance as the community grows explosively. Three major families—linked by a complex web of loyalty, betrayal, desire and ambition—are the driving force behind their hometown’s transformation into an urban superpower. Brimming with intelligence and wit, The Explosion Chronicles considers the high stakes of passion and power, the consequences of corruption and greed, the polarising dynamics of love and hate between families, and the seemingly unstoppable excesses of capitalism—it is a smart, flamboyant and poetic tale of ambition, lies and vice from China’s master satirist. Yan Lianke was born in 1958 in Henan Province, China. Text has published his novels Serve the People!, Lenin’s Kisses, Dream of Ding Village and The Four Books. Yan Lianke won the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize in 2013. He has also won two of China’s most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Prize and the Lao She Award. He lives in Bejing. Translator Carlos Rojas is Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. His translations include two other novels by Yan Lianke: Lenin’s Kisses and The Four Books.

Download or read book Three Brothers written by Yan Lianke and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Franz Kafka Prize–winning author. “Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness . . . a deeply heartfelt account of his family in the 1960s and 70s.” —Xiaolu Guo, award-winning author of Nine Continents With lyricism and deep emotion, Yan Lianke chronicles the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own during the Cultural Revolution. Living in a remote village, Yan’s parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on New Year and festival days, and while Yan dreams of fried scallion buns, and even steals from his father to buy sesame seed cakes. He yearns to leave the village, however he can, and soon novels become an escape. He resolves to become a writer himself after reading on the back of a novel that its author was given leave to remain in the city of Harbin after publishing her book. In the evenings, after finishing back-breaking shifts hauling stones at a cement factory, sometimes sixteen hours long, he sets to work writing. He is ultimately delivered from the drudgery and danger of manual labor by a career in the Army, but he is filled with regrets as he recalls these years of scarcity, turmoil, and poverty. A philosophical portrait of grief, death, home, and fate that gleams with Yan’s quick wit and gift for imagery, Three Brothers is a personal portrait of a politically devastating period, and a celebration of the power of the family to hold together even in the harshest circumstances. “This engaging book asks readers to consider the nature of life and death, city versus country, and the impact generations can have on each other.” —Winnipeg Free Press

Download or read book Lenin s Kisses written by Yan Lianke and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mystifying climatic incongruity begins the award-winning novel Lenin’s Kisses—an absurdist, tragicomic masterpiece set in modern day China. Nestled deep within the Balou mountains, spared from the government’s watchful eye, the harmonious people of Liven had enough food and leisure to be fully content. But when their crops and livelihood are obliterated by a seven-day snowstorm in the middle of a sweltering summer, a county official arrives with a lucrative scheme both to raise money for the district and boost his career. The majority of the 197 villagers are disabled, and he convinces them to start a traveling performance troupe highlighting such acts as One-Eye’s one-eyed needle threading. With the profits from this extraordinary show, he intends to buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russia and install it in a grand mausoleum to attract tourism, in the ultimate marriage of capitalism and communism. However, the success of the Shuanghuai County Special-Skills Performance Troupe comes at a serious price. Yan Lianke, one of China’s most distinguished writers—whose works often push the envelope of his country’s censorship system—delivers a humorous, daring, and riveting portrait of the trappings and consequences of greed and corruption at the heart of humanity.

Download or read book The Day the Sun Died written by Yan Lianke and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘One of the masters of modern Chinese literature’ Jung Chang This gripping dystopia contrasts the reality of life in China today with the sunny optimism of the ‘Chinese dream’. One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices that something strange is going on. As the residents would usually be settling down for the night, instead they start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere. Li Niannian watches, mystified. Until he realises the people are dreamwalking, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already gone down. And before too long, as more and more people succumb, in the black of night all hell breaks loose. Set over the course of one night, The Day the Sun Died pits chaos and darkness against the bright ‘Chinese dream’ promoted by President Xi Jinping. We are thrown into the middle of an increasingly strange and troubling waking nightmare as Li Niannian and his father struggle to save the town, and persuade the beneficent sun to rise again. Praise for Yan Lianke's books: ‘Nothing short of a masterpiece’ Guardian ‘A hyper-real tour de force, a blistering condemnation of political corruption and excess’ Financial Times ‘Mordant satire from a brave fabulist’ Daily Mail ‘Exuberant and imaginative’ Sunday Times ‘I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth’ New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Slow Boat to China and Other Stories written by Kim Chew Ng and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dream and Swine and Aurora," "Deep in the Rubber Forest," "Fish Bones," "Allah's Will," "Monkey Butts, Fire, and Dangerous Things"—Ng Kim Chew's stories are raw, rural, and rich with the traditions of his native Malaysia. They are also full of humor and spirit, demonstrating a deep appreciation for human ingenuity in the face of poverty, oppression, and exile. Ng creatively captures the riot of cultures that roughly coexist on the Malay Peninsula and its surrounding archipelago. Their interplay is heightened by the encroaching forces of globalization, which bring new opportunities for cultural experimentation, but also an added dimension of alienation. In prose that is intimate and atmospheric, these sensitively crafted, resonant stories depict the struggles of individuals torn between their ancestral and adoptive homes, communities pressured by violence, and minority Malaysian Chinese in dynamic tension with the Islamic Malay majority. Told through relatable characters, Ng's tales show why he has become a leading Malaysian writer of Chinese fiction, representing in mood, voice, and rhythm the dislocation of a people and a country in transition.

Download or read book The Truth and Other Lies written by Sascha Arango and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-06-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A literary crime thriller with “a clever plot that always surprises, told with dark humor and dry wit” (The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice), this brilliant debut follows a famous author whose wife—the brains behind his success—meets an untimely death, leaving him to deal with the consequences. Henry Hayden seems like someone you might admire, or even come to think of as a friend. A famous bestselling author. A loving and devoted husband. A generous and considerate neighbor. But Henry Hayden is a construction, a mask. His past is a secret, his methods more so. Only he and his wife know that she is the actual writer of the novels that made him famous. When his hidden-in-plain-sight mistress becomes pregnant, it seems his carefully conceived façade is about to crumble. And on a rain-soaked night at the edge of a dangerous cliff, his permanent solution becomes his most terrible mistake. Now not only are the police after Henry but his past—which he has painstakingly kept hidden—threatens to catch up with him as well. Henry is an ingenious man, and he works out an ingenious plan, weaving lies, truths, and half-truths into a story that might help him survive. Still, the noose tightens. Smart, sardonic, and compulsively readable, this is the story of a man whose cunning allows him to evade the consequences of his every action, even when he’s standing on the edge of the abyss.

Download or read book Kinder Than Solitude written by Yiyun Li and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound mystery is at the heart of this magnificent new novel by Yiyun Li, “one of America’s best young novelists” (Newsweek) and the celebrated author of The Vagrants, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Moving back and forth in time, between America today and China in the 1990s, Kinder Than Solitude is the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed. As one of the three observes, “Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.” When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious incident in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, avoiding entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude. In Beijing, Boyang struggles to deal with an inability to love, and with the outcome of what happened among the three friends twenty years before. Brilliantly written, a breathtaking page-turner, Kinder Than Solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and life. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound insight, Yiyun Li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person’s present and future. Praise for Kinder Than Solitude “This is an exceptional novel, and Yiyun Li has grown into one of our major novelists.”—Salman Rushdie “Yiyun Li infuses the traditional form with a fresh, rigorous beauty and a sense of permanence and increasing value.”—Mona Simpson, author of My Hollywood “[A] sleek, powerful novel about the weight of memory, the brunt of loss and the myriad ways the past can crimp the soul . . . Li gives us gifts of gorgeous prose. . . . Rarely are ordinary humans given such eloquent witness.”—The Washington Post “What makes [Kinder Than Solitude] so vivid is its humanity. . . . It is an inquiry into how the past scars us, shaping present and future, and some deeds, once committed, can never be undone.”—Los Angeles Times “[Li’s] true gift . . . is old-fashioned storytelling [and] a sense that a life, a whole life, can be captured on pages.”—The Boston Globe “A stunning, dark, and beautiful book . . . Yiyun Li writes with characteristic genius.”—Paul Harding, author of Tinkers and Enon

Download or read book Dupes written by Paul Kengor and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this startling, intensively researched book, bestselling historian Paul Kengor shines light on a deeply troubling aspect of American history: the prominent role of the "dupe." From the Bolshevik Revolution through the Cold War and right up to the present, many progressives have unwittingly aided some of America's most dangerous opponents. Based on never-before-published FBI files, Soviet archives, and other primary sources, Dupes exposes the legions of liberals who have furthered the objectives of America's adversaries. Kengor shows not only how such dupes contributed to history's most destructive ideology—Communism, which claimed at least 100 million lives—but also why they are so relevant to today's politics.

Download or read book Bronze and Sunflower written by Cao Wenxuan and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written, timeless tale by Cao Wenxuan, best-selling Chinese author and 2016 recipient of the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Award. Sunflower is an only child, and when her father is sent to the rural Cadre School, she has to go with him. Her father is an established artist from the city and finds his new life of physical labor and endless meetings exhausting. Sunflower is lonely and longs to play with the local children in the village across the river. When her father tragically drowns, Sunflower is taken in by the poorest family in the village, a family with a son named Bronze. Until Sunflower joins his family, Bronze was an only child, too, and hasn’t spoken a word since he was traumatized by a terrible fire. Bronze and Sunflower become inseparable, understanding each other as only the closest friends can. Translated from Mandarin, the story meanders gracefully through the challenges that face the family, creating a timeless story of the trials of poverty and the power of love and loyalty to overcome hardship.

Download or read book Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire written by José Manuel Prieto and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire was acclaimed by The Hartford Courant as "a thrilling discovery ... a reversal of the letters [of] Saul Bellow's Herzog ... [with] a Nabokovian delight in words and texts." J. is a smuggler living in Russia, making his living fencing the flotsam of communism's collapse. In Istanbul he takes a commission to trap an endangered Russian butterfly and decides to use it as an opportunity to smuggle V., his Russian lover who has no papers, back into her homeland. In the port of Odessa, she disappears, and J. continues alone to a small village on the Black Sea. Letters from V. begin to arrive, and as J. hunts the butterfly, he seeks a way to lure V. back into his life. Equal parts bittersweet love story, international intrigue, and one man's quest to write the perfect love letter, Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire, wrote The Tennessean, is "an amazing jewel of a story ... that winks with wit [and] wears its astonishing craftsmanship lightly." "An aesthetically blissful reading experience ... Nabokov's spirit, alive and kind, has touched [Prieto] with its butterfly wings." -- Aleksandar Hemon, The Village Voice Literary Supplement "...Nocturnal Butterflies is an impressive performance by a writer whose gifts are clearly abundant." -- Richard Bernstein, The New York Times "A beautiful, lavish, seedy, poetic, and magical book.... Pure pleasure for the literary mind." -- Chris Kridler, The Baltimore Sun