Download or read book Notes of a Desolate Man written by T’ien-wen Chu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999-05-06 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the coveted China Times Novel Prize, this postmodern, first-person tale of a contemporary Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences is among the most important recent novels in Taiwan. The narrator, Xiao Shao, recollects a series of friends and lovers, as he watches his childhood friend, Ah Yao, succumb to complications from AIDS. The brute fact of Ah Yao's death focuses Shao's simultaneously erudite and erotic reflections magnetically on the core theme of mortality. By turns humorous and despondent, the narrator struggles to come to terms with Ah Yao's risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death; the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eros; the solace of writing; the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games; and life on the edge of mainstream Taiwanese society. His feverish journey through forests of metaphor and allusion—from Fellini and Lévi-Strauss to classical Chinese poetry—serves as a litany protecting him from the ravages of time and finitude. Impressive in scope and detail, Notes of a Desolate Man employs the motif of its characters' marginalized sexuality to highlight Taiwan's vivid and fragile existence on the periphery of mainland China. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin's masterful translation brings Chu T'ien-wen's lyrical and inventive pastiche of political, poetic, and sexual desire to the English-speaking world.
Download or read book Situating Sexualities written by Fran Martin and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book in English to analyse the stunning rise to prominence of cultures of dissident sexuality in Taiwan during the 1990s. Positioned at the crossroads of queer theory and postcolonial cultural studies, this book intervenes in current debates on sexuality and globalization to argue that the current emergence of public, dissident sexualities in non-Western locations like Taiwan cannot be reduced to the effects of homogenizing 'Westernization'. Instead, Situating Sexualities approaches the queer sexualities represented in recent Taiwanese fiction, film and public culture as dynamic formations that combine local knowledge with globalizing discourses on gay and lesbian identity to produce sexualities that are multiple, shifting and inherently hybrid. Equally, the book pushes out the limits of 'queer' to challenge the Eurocentrism of much queer theory to date. Consistently critical of essentializing accounts of 'Chinese' culture, the book nevertheless highlights some of the important ways in which Taiwanese formations of dissident sexuality differ from the familiar Euro-American formations.
Download or read book The Taste of Apples written by Huang Chun-ming and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-04-18 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the preeminent writer of Taiwanese nativist fiction and the leading translator of Chinese literature come these poignant accounts of everyday life in rural and small-town Taiwan. Huang is frequently cited as one of the most original and gifted storytellers in the Chinese language, and these selections reveal his genius. In "The Two Sign Painters," TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. "His Son's Big Doll" introduces the tortured soul inside a walking advertisement, and in "Xiaoqi's Cap" a dissatisfied pressure-cooker salesman is fascinated by a young schoolgirl. Huang's characters—generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty—come to life in all their human uniqueness, free from idealization.
Download or read book Desolate Angel written by Dennis McNally and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A blockbuster of a biography . . . absolutely magnificent."--San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the '60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism. Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouac's frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouac's life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times.
Download or read book In Search of Snow written by Luis Alberto Urrea and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the hot Arizona desert of the late 1950s, Mike McGurk comes of age in one big, riotous gush. Trapped pumping gas at a desolate roadstop, he yearns for things he has never known: love, hope, and the soft, white calmness of snow. Mike's world is filled with a menagerie of quirky characters, who cope with the weight of their unfulfilled dreams with bravado, humor, and violence. Mike trades snappy insults with his macho father, Texaco Turk McGurk, a moustachioed amateur boxer and self-proclaimed war hero who is unable to talk about love. Mike lusts after Lily, his seductive, poem-writing cousin. He cowers before and then confronts the vicious Ramses, grandson of Mr. Sneezy, the wisecracking Apache. And he is rescued by his best friend, Bobo, who delivers him into the care of the loving and generous Mama and Papa Garcia. In Search of Snow is an explosive coming-of-age adventure, full of hilarious episodes and still, poignant moments. Like a blue-collar Don Quixote, Mike must blow up his windmills before he can set off to find the things he lacks, especially the snow that will temper the passion he has just set aflame.
Download or read book Notes of a Desolate Man written by Tianwen Zhu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel on homosexuals in Taiwan. The protagonists are two quite different men, one maintains a low profile, the other is an activist in Act-Up.
Download or read book The Road written by Cormac McCarthy and published by Vintage Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a novel set in an indefinite, futuristic, post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape, struggling to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity
Download or read book City of the Queen written by Shuqing Shi and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After having been kidnapped from her home Huang, a young Chinese girl is sold into the prostitution trade in Hong Kong. Despite these cruel beginngs she survives and prospers to become a wealthy landowner. The novel also follows the lives of other family members and generations, giving us a broad look at Chinese and British cultures and colonialism.
Download or read book Desolate Landscapes written by John F. Hoffecker and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The burning question, of course, is why a creature that originated in cozy tropical Africa would go live in a cold and dry place, especially at its coldest and driest, between 300,000 and 12,000 years ago. Alas, no pioneer journals survive, at least translated into a modern European language; and Hoffecker (U. of Colorado-Boulder), a specialist in the archaeology of people in cold environments, true to his sources, remains silent on the issue. He summarizes the Ice Age settlement of Eastern European during the transition from Neanderthals to immediate human ancestors, within the context of human evolution as a whole. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers written by Lihong Xiao and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Zhenguan's journey of first love, suffering, disillusionment, and - ultimately - zenlike triumph, Hsiao Li-hung celebrates the values and traditions that have sustained and nurtured life in Taiwan through the centuries.".
Download or read book The Devil s Highway written by Luis Alberto Urrea and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2008-11-16 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important book from a Pulitzer Prize finalist follows the brutal journey a group of men take to cross the Mexican border: "the single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy" (The Atlantic). In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto Urrea wrote about what happened to them. The result was a national bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a "book of the year" in multiple newspapers, and a work proclaimed as a modern American classic.
Download or read book The Columbia History of Chinese Literature written by Victor H. Mair and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-22 with total page 1369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive yet portable, this account of the development of Chinese literature from the very beginning up to the present brings the riches of this august literary tradition into focus for the general reader. Organized chronologically with thematic chapters interspersed, the fifty-five original chapters by leading specialists cover all genres and periods of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama, with a special focus on such subjects as popular culture, the impact of religion upon literature, the role of women, and relationships with non-Sinitic languages and peoples.
Download or read book Old Stories Retold written by Andrew G. Stuckey and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2010-04-30 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Old Stories Retold explores the ways modern Chinese narratives dramatize and embody the historical sense that links them to the past and to the Chinese literary tradition. Largely guided by Walter Benjamin’s discussions of history, G. Andrew Stuckey looks at the ways Chinese narrative engages a historical process that pieces together fragments of the past into new configurations to better serve present needs. By examining intertextual connections between separate texts, Stuckey seeks to discover traces of an “original,” whether it be thought of as the past, history, or tradition, when it has been rewritten in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Old Stories Retold shows how the articulation of the past into new historical configurations disrupts accepted understandings of the past, and as such, can be intentionally pitted against modernist historical knowledge to resist the modernist ends that this knowledge is mobilized to achieve.
Download or read book Queer in Translation written by B.J. Epstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the field of translation studies has developed, translators and translation scholars have become more aware of the unacknowledged ideologies inherent both in texts themselves and in the mechanisms that affect their circulation. This book both analyses the translation of queerness and applies queer thought to issues of translation. It sheds light on the manner in which heteronormative societies influence the selection, reading and translation of texts and pays attention to the means by which such heterosexism might be subverted. It considers the ways in which queerness can be repressed, ignored or made invisible in translation, and shows how translations might expose or underline the queerness – or the homophobic implications – of a given text. Balancing the theoretical with the practical, this book investigates what is culturally at stake when particular texts are translated from one culture to another, raising the question of the relationship between translation, colonialism and globalization. It also takes the insights derived from intercultural translation studies and applies them to other fields of cultural criticism. The first multi-focus, in-depth study on translating queer, translating queerly and queering translation, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of gender and sexuality, queer theory and queer studies, literature, film studies and translation studies.
Download or read book A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature written by Yingjin Zhang and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This wide-ranging Companion provides a vital overview of modern Chinese literature in different geopolitical areas, from the 1840s to now. It reviews major accomplishments of Chinese literary scholarship published in Chinese and English and brings attention to previously neglected, important areas. Offers the most thorough and concise coverage of modern Chinese literature to date, drawing attention to previously neglected areas such as late Qing, Sinophone, and ethnic minority literature Several chapters explore literature in relation to Sinophone geopolitics, regional culture, urban culture, visual culture, print media, and new media The introduction and two chapters furnish overviews of the institutional development of modern Chinese literature in Chinese and English scholarship since the mid-twentieth century Contributions from leading literary scholars in mainland China and Hong Kong add their voices to international scholarship
Download or read book Translation Research Projects 2 written by and published by Anthony Pym. This book was released on 2007 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book My South Seas Sleeping Beauty written by Guixing Zhang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My South Seas Sleeping Beauty is a captivating coming-of-age tale set in the magical jungles of Borneo. Told through the vivid recollections of a Chinese-Malay youth, the novel recounts the life of Su Qi, a troubled, sensitive son of a wealthy family, and exemplifies the imaginative range of one of Taiwan's most innovative writers. "There were all sorts of stories about how my younger sister died," Su Qi begins, hinting at the power of memory to bend and refract truth. Yet whichever the real story may be, the fact is that the death of Su Qi's sister created an irrevocable rift in Su Qi's family, driving his father into the arms of aboriginal women and his mother into a world of her own invention. In an effort to escape the oppression of home, Su Qi loses himself in the surrounding jungle, full of Communist guerillas and strange tropical fauna. The jungle further blurs the line between fantasy and reality for Su Qi, until he meets Chunxi, the beautiful, frail daughter of his father's best friend. Chunxi is an oasis of kindness and honesty in an otherwise cruel and evasive world, but after a bizarre accident, Chunxi falls into a deep coma, and Su Qui flees to Taiwan. In college Su Qi meets Keyi, a vivacious siren who helps Su Qi forget not only his violent past but also the colorful tales of his youth. When a family member dies, however, Su Qi is pulled back to the jungles of Borneo where he begins to unravel the secrets of his family's past-a story stranger than any fairy tale-and learns that his cherished dream of awakening his beloved Chunxi may be more than just a fantasy. Influenced by the lyricism of William Faulkner and the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, My South Seas Sleeping Beauty is a deeply evocative exploration of sexuality and identity and a masterful reworking of Chinese and Western myth. Valerie Jaffee's careful translation retains all the tone and detail of the original work and provides rare access to a new and exciting generation of Chinese writers born in Southeast Asia.
