Download or read book Queer Taiwanese Literature A Reader written by Howard Chiang and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia and host the first annual gay pride in the Sinophone Pacific, Taiwan is a historic center of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture. With this blazing path of activism, queer Taiwanese literature has also risen in prominence and there is a growing popular interest in stories about the transgression of gender and sexual norms. Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, queer authors have redefined Taiwan's cultural scene, and throughout the 1990s many of their works won the most prestigious literary awards and accolades. This anthology provides a deeper understanding of queer literary history in Taiwan. It includes a selection of short stories, previously untranslated, written by Taiwanese authors dating from 1975 to 2020. Readers are introduced to a wide range of themes: bisexuality, aging, mobility, diaspora, AIDS, indigeneity, recreational drug use, transgender identity, surrogacy, and many others. The diversity of literary tropes and styles canvased in this book reflects the profusion of gender and sexual configurations that has marked Taiwan's complex history for the past half century. Queer Taiwanese Literature: A Reader is a timely and important resource for readers interested in Taiwan studies, queer literature, and global cultural studies. This book is part of the Cambria Literature from Taiwan Series, in collaboration with the National Museum of Taiwan Literature and National Taiwan Normal University.

Download or read book The Membranes written by Chi Ta-wei and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.

Download or read book Angelwings written by and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-01-31 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lesbian and gay--or queer--fiction (known in Mandarin as tongzhi wenxue) constitutes a major contribution to Taiwanese literature, as evidenced by the remarkable number of prestigious literary awards won by many of the authors of the short stories presented here. Indeed, the meteoric rise of this new genre was a defining feature of Taiwan's literary scene in the 1990s. Queer fiction was also instrumental in forming self-identifying subcultural gay readerships, thus serving a significant political function. But most strikingly, this fiction has been immensely popular with general readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as in diasporic Chinese communities worldwide. The startlingly fresh, brave voices that speak through these stories attest to the powerful social ferment of the past ten years in Taiwan, which have witnessed a revolution in discourses on sex and sexuality in the public sphere. Contributors: Chu T'ien-Wen, Qiu Miaojin, Chu T'ien-Hsin, Hsu Yoshen, Lin Yuyi, Lin Chun Ying, Chen Xue, Hong Ling, Chi Tawei, Wu Jiwen.

Download or read book A Taiwanese Literature Reader written by Nikky Lin and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The six stories in this collection are representative works from the mature period and the war period. Each story depicts different hardships and predicaments faced by Taiwan as a colony under Japanese rule, offering insight into how this part of Taiwan's history continues to impact contemporary Taiwanese society.

Download or read book Notes of a Crocodile written by Qiu Miaojin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2018 LUCIEN STRYK ASIAN TRANSLATION PRIZE The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award. An NYRB Classics Original Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure. Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend. Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

Download or read book Green Island written by Shawna Yang Ryan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Shawna Yang Ryan’s propulsive storytelling carries us through a bloody time in Taiwanese history, its implications still reverberating today. The story is haunted by questions about whether Taiwan is a part of China or its own country, what the costs are of standing up for one’s beliefs and by the choices made by one father and his daughter. Green Island is a tough, unsentimental and moving novel that is a memorial not only to the heroes, but also to the survivors.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer A stunning story of love, betrayal, and family, set against the backdrop of a changing Taiwan over the course of the twentieth century. February 28, 1947: Trapped inside the family home amid an uprising that has rocked Taipei, Dr. Tsai delivers his youngest daughter, the unnamed narrator of Green Island, just after midnight as the city is plunged into martial law. In the following weeks, as the Chinese Nationalists act to crush the opposition, Dr. Tsai becomes one of the many thousands of people dragged away from their families and thrown into prison. His return, after more than a decade, is marked by alienation from his loved ones and paranoia among his community—conflicts that loom over the growing bond he forms with his youngest daughter. Years later, this troubled past follows her to the United States, where, as a mother and a wife, she too is forced to decide between what is right and what might save her family—the same choice she witnessed her father make many years before. As the novel sweeps across six decades and two continents, the life of the narrator shadows the course of Taiwan’s history from the end of Japanese colonial rule to the decades under martial law and, finally, to Taiwan’s transformation into a democracy. But, above all, Green Island is a lush and lyrical story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, raising the question: how far would you be willing to go for the ones you love?

Download or read book Last Words from Montmartre written by Qiu Miaojin and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NYRB Classics Original When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note. The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.

Download or read book TAIWANESE LITERATURE READER written by and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Sinopticon written by Gu Shi and published by Rebellion Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2021-11-09 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This celebration of Chinese Science Fiction — thirteen stories, all translated for the first time into English — represents a unique exploration of the nation’s speculative fiction from the late 20th Century onwards, curated and translated by critically acclaimed writer and essayist Xueting Christine Ni. From the renowned Jiang Bo’s ‘Starship: Library' to Regina Kanyu Wang’s ‘The Tide of Moon City, and Anna Wu’s ‘Meisje met de Parel', this is a collection for all fans of great fiction. Award winners, bestsellers, screenwriters, playwrights, philosophers, university lecturers and computer programmers, these thirteen writers represent the breadth of Chinese SF, from new to old: Gu Shi, Han Song, Hao Jingfang, Nian Yu, Wang Jinkang, Zhao Haihong, Tang Fei, Ma Boyong, Anna Wu, A Que, Bao Shu, Regina Kanyu Wang and Jiang Bo.

Download or read book A Clash of Steel A Treasure Island Remix written by C.B. Lee and published by Feiwel & Friends. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two intrepid girls hunt for a legendary treasure on the deadly high seas in this YA remix of the classic adventure novel Treasure Island. 1826. The sun is setting on the golden age of piracy, and the legendary Dragon Fleet, the scourge of the South China Sea, is no more. Its ruthless leader, a woman known only as the Head of the Dragon, is now only a story, like the ones Xiang has grown up with all her life. She desperately wants to prove her worth, especially to her mother, a shrewd businesswoman who never seems to have enough time for Xiang. Her father is also only a story, dead at sea before Xiang was born. Her single memento of him is a pendant she always wears, a simple but plain piece of gold jewelry. But the pendant's true nature is revealed when a mysterious girl named Anh steals it, only to return it to Xiang in exchange for her help in decoding the tiny map scroll hidden inside. The revelation that Xiang's father sailed with the Dragon Fleet and tucked away this secret changes everything. Rumor has it that the legendary Head of the Dragon had one last treasure—the plunder of a thousand ports—that for decades has only been a myth, a fool's journey. Xiang is convinced this map could lead to the fabled treasure. Captivated with the thrill of adventure, she joins Anh and her motley crew off in pursuit of the island. But the girls soon find that the sea—and especially those who sail it—are far more dangerous than the legends led them to believe. Praise for A Clash of Steel: A Cosmopolitan Best YA Book of 2021 "This deeply immersive adventure features deftly interwoven Chinese and Vietnamese, luscious culinary descriptions, and well-rendered explorations of imperialism, treasure, found family, and love." —Publishers Weekly, starred review "Vividly realized and brimming with romantic adventure. Rooted in the legend of Chinese pirate queen Ching Shih, C.B. Lee’s A Clash of Steel is richly imagined and thrilling to the end." —Malinda Lo, bestselling author of Last Night at the Telegraph Club "Lavishly drawn and studded with jewels from the original, C.B. Lee has written a remix that delves deep into questions of family, love, and treasure. This is a book I wish I'd had as a young, queer teen and it deserves a spot in any collection." —Natalie C. Parker, author of the Seafire trilogy The Remixed Classics Series A Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remix by C.B. Lee So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix by Bethany C. Morrow Travelers Along the Way: A Robin Hood Remix by Aminah Mae Safi What Souls Are Made Of: A Wuthering Heights Remix by Tasha Suri Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore My Dear Henry: A Jekyll & Hyde Remix by Kalynn Bayron Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remix by Caleb Roehrig Into the Bright Open: A Secret Garden Remix by Cherie Dimaline Most Ardently: A Pride & Prejudice Remix by Gabe Cole Novoa

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 Queer Literature in the Sinosphere written by Hongwei Bao and published by . This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queer Literature in the Sinosphere is the most up-to-date English-language study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) themed literature and culture in the Chinese-speaking world. From classical homoerotic texts to contemporary boys' love fan fiction, this book showcases the richness and diversity of queer Chinese literature across the full spectrum of genres, styles, topics and cultural politics. The book features authors and literary works from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora. Featuring chapters by leading scholars from around the world, this book rewrites literature, history and culture from a queer lens in China and globally.

Download or read book Anti Book written by Nicholas Thoburn and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-12-15 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text. Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.” An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.

Download or read book The Unpassing written by Chia-Chia Lin and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major US debut novel in 2019 Shortlisted for the Centre for Fiction First Novel Prize A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice In Chia-Chia Lin's piercing debut novel, The Unpassing, we meet a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggling to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. The father, hardworking but beaten down, is employed as a plumber and contractor, while the loving, strong-willed, unpredictably emotional mother holds the house together. When ten-year-old Gavin contracts meningitis at school, he falls into a deep, nearly fatal coma. He wakes a week later to learn that his younger sister, Ruby, was infected too. She did not survive. Routine takes over for the grieving family, with the siblings caring for one another as they befriend the neighbouring children and explore the surrounding woods, while distance grows between the parents as each deals with the loss alone. When the father, increasingly guilt-ridden after Ruby's death, is sued over an improperly installed water well that gravely harms a little boy, the chaos that follows unearths what really happened to Ruby. With flowing prose that evokes the terrifying beauty of the Alaskan wilderness, Chia-Chia Lin explores the fallout from the loss of a child and a family's anguish playing out in a place that doesn't yet feel like home. Emotionally raw and subtly suspenseful, The Unpassing is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the myth of the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately profound, reality. 'A singularly vast and captivating novel, beautifully written in free-flowing prose that quietly disarms with its intermittent moments of poetic idiosyncrasy' New York Times Book Review 'A striking debut by an unforgettable new voice' Cosmopolitan

Download or read book Taiwanese Literature as World Literature written by Pei-yin Lin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Owing to Taiwan's multi-ethnic nature and palimpsestic colonial past, Taiwanese literature is naturally multilingual. Although it can be analyzed through frameworks of Japanophone literature and Chinese literature, and the more provocative Sinophone literature, only through viewing Taiwanese literature as world literature can we redress the limits of national identity and fully examine writers' transculturation practice, globally minded vision, and the politics of its circulation. Throughout the colonial era, Taiwanese writers gained inspiration from global literary trends mainly but not exclusively through the medium of Japanese and Chinese. Modernism was the mainstream literary style in 1960s Taiwan, and since the 1980s Taiwanese literature has demonstrated a unique trajectory shaped jointly by postmodernism and postcolonialism. These movements exhibit Taiwanese writers' creative adaptations of world literary thought as a response to their local and trans-national reality. During the postwar years Taiwanese literature began to be more systematically introduced to world readers through translation. Over the past few decades, Taiwanese authors and their translated works have participated in global conversations, such as those on climate change, the "post-truth" era, and ethnic and gender equality. Bringing together scholars and translators from Europe, North America, and East Asia, the volume focuses on three interrelated themes – the framing and worlding ploys of Taiwanese literature, Taiwanese writers' experience of transculturation, and politics behind translating Taiwanese literature. The volume stimulates new ways of conceptualizing Taiwanese literature, demonstrates remarkable cases of Taiwanese authors' co-option of world trends in their Taiwan-concerned writing, and explores its readership and dissemination.

Download or read book Queer Theory and Translation Studies written by Brian James Baer and published by New Perspectives in Translation and Interpreting Studies. This book was released on 2020 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book explores the relevance of queer theory to Translation Studies and of translation to Global Sexuality Studies. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of queer theory, this book places queer theory and Translation Studies in a productive and mutually interrogating relationship. After framing the discussion of actual and potential interfaces between queer sexuality and queer textuality, the chapters trace the transnational circulation of queer texts, focusing on the place of translation in "gay" anthologies, the packaging of queer life writing for global audiences, and the translation of lyric poetry as a distinct site of queer performativity. Baer analyzes fictional translators in literature and film, the treatment of translation in historical and ethnographic studies of sexual and linguistic others, the work of queer translators, and the reception of queer texts in translation. Including a range of case studies to exemplify key ethical issues relevant to all scholars of global sexuality and postcolonial studies, this book is essential reading for advanced students, scholars, and researchers in Translation Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and related areas.

Download or read book Bestiary written by K-Ming Chang and published by One World. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets. “Gorgeous and gorgeously grotesque . . . Every line of this sensuous, magical-realist marvel is utterly alive.”—O: The Oprah Magazine FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterward, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth—and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny. With a poetic voice of crackling electricity, K-Ming Chang is an explosive young writer who combines the wit and fabulism of Helen Oyeyemi with the subversive storytelling of Maxine Hong Kingston. Tracing one family’s history from Taiwan to America, from Arkansas to California, Bestiary is a novel of migration, queer lineages, and girlhood. Praise for Bestiary “[A] vivid, fabulist debut . . . the prose is full of imagery. Chang’s wild story of a family’s tenuous grasp on belonging in the U.S. stands out with a deep commitment to exploring discomfort with the body and its transformations.”—Publishers Weekly