First collection published in English by major, multiple award-winning Chinese writer Yan Geling.

    He is also one of the finest Chinese prose stylists of all time. Literary critics and historians have offered several reasons for why Shen Congwen is a great writer. The foremost explanation is his power as a stylist. He could make the Chinese language beautiful.Some critics have praised Shen Congwen for creating characters with beautiful souls. Readers credit him with having described beautiful and fulfilling styles of life, even in materially primitive surroundings, that conjure up the "health and dignity" prized by the Crescent Moon writers. Other critics value Shen Congwen as a realist writer. He has written many works exposing the abuses of the military in the countryside, and the vanity of the urban bourgeoisie.Most of the short stories in this collection, typeset in bilingual format, reveal the plight and the strength of the common people. They were chosen from the period when Shen had already honed a fine writing style, and they were written about rural folks in his native region, and about people he knew from his daily life. There are contradictions between the "new" and the "old," and also between human values with enough integrity to nurture life, versus corruption that leads to the decline and death of a culture.

    Unlike his contemporaries from the heady days of the Beijing Spring in the late 1970s - most of whom have either retreated into a very private poetry or stopped writing altogether - Yang Lian has gone on to forge a complex poetry whose themes are the search for a Yeatsian mature wisdom, the accommodation of modernity within the ancient and book-haunted Chinese tradition, and a rapprochement between the literatures of East and West.