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The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber) is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature, beloved by readers ever since it was first published in 1791. The story revolves around the young scion of a mighty clan who, instead of studying for the civil service examinations, frolics with his maidservants and girl cousins. The narrative is cast within a mythic framework in which the protagonist’s rebellion against Confucian strictures is guided by a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system. This book is a straightforward guide to a complex classic that was written at a time...
Fourteen short stories by one of the major figures in modern Chinese literature.
Literary critics such as C. T. Hsia called Pai Hsienyung a "rare talent" who according to another critic, "has absorbed the diverse techniques of contemporary Western literature to temper and modernize his writing; however, the characters he writes about remain Chinese people and the stories he tells remain Chinese tales." Widely acclaimed as a classic of contemporary fiction, Taipei People has been frequently compared to James Joyce's Dubliners. Henry Miller considers Pai Hsienyung "a master of portraiture." The collection of fourteen stories from this reprint edition has already been translated to great acclaim into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.
The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identityargues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity. Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject," which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projec...
Incisive and confessional, Raised by Wolves collects the most acclaimed work of Taiwanese poet -filmmaker Amang. In her poems, Amang turns her razor-sharp eye to everything from her suitors ("For twenty years I’ve loved you, twenty years / So why not say yes / You want to see my nude photos ?") to international affairs —"You’d have to win the lottery ten times over / And the U.N. hasn’t won it even once." Keenly observational yet occasionally absurd, these poems are urgent and lucid, as Amang embraces the cruelty and beauty of life in equal measure. Raised by Wolves also presents a groundbreaking new framework for translation. Far from positing the transition between languages as an invisible and fixed process, Amang and translator Steve Bradbury let the reader in. Multiple English versions of the same Chinese poem often accompany dialogues between author and translator: the two debate as wide -ranging topics as the merits of English tenses, the role of Chinese mythology, and whether to tell the truth you have to lie a little, or a lot. Author, her poems, and translator, work in tandem, "Wanting that which was unbearable / To appear unbearable / Just as it should be."
Even before Beijing Opera there was Kunqu, an opera form with 600 years of history. This highly distinctive form of Chinese theatre art is comprised of various elements-music, singing, dancing, recitation, and movement. As China's oldest and most influential theatrical tradition, Kunqu combines poetic librettos from the cream of classic Chinese literature (The Peony Pavilion, The Story of the Lute, The Peach Blossom Fan, etc.) with soft and refined music. A vivid, fully-illustrated picture of the origins and development of this grand performing art.
'NDiaye is a hypnotic storyteller with an unflinching understanding of the rock-bottom reality of most people's life.' New York Times ' One of France's most exciting prose stylists.' The Guardian. Obsessed by her encounters with the mysterious green women, and haunted by the Garonne River, a nameless narrator seeks them out in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou. Each encounter reveals different aspects of the women; real or imagined, dead or alive, seductive or suicidal, driving the narrator deeper into her obsession, in this unsettling exploration of identity, memory and paranoia. Self Portrait in Green is the multi-prize winning, Marie NDiaye's brilliant subversion of the memoir. Written in diary entries, with lyrical prose and dreamlike imagery, we start with and return to the river, which mirrors the narrative by posing more questions than it answers.
Tun-huang Popular Narratives presents authoritative translations of four vernacular Chinese stories, taken from fragmentary texts usually referred to as pien-wen or 'transformation texts'. Dating from the late T'ang (618-907) and Five Dynasties (907-959) periods, the texts were discovered early last century in a cave at Tun-huang, in Chinese Central Asia. However, written down in an early colloquial language by semi-literate individuals and posing formidable philological problems, the texts have not been studied critically before. Nevertheless they represent the only surviving primary evidence of a widespread and flourishing world of popular entertainment during these centuries. The tales deal with both religious (mostly Buddhist) and secular themes, and make exciting and vivid reading.
When Chiang Kai-shek arrived at Sian in the fall of 1936 and laid plans for launching his last campaign against the Red Army with an expectation of exterminating it in a month, he badly misjudged the mood of the Tungpei (Northeast) Army and more so its leader, Chang Hsueh-liang, better known as the Young Marshal. Refusing to fight the Communists, Chang with the loyal support of his officers staged a coup d’état by kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek for two weeks at Sian. Almost forty years after the melodrama was over, the Sian Incident still absorbs much attention from both Chinese and Western scholars as well as the reading public. The Sian Incident attempts to bring together whatever information has been thus far gleaned about the subject, and to cover all aspects and controversies involved in it. [1, xi, xii]