Far from being a simplistic exercise in anti-Communist propaganda (two previous novels Chang wrote were pro-Communist), Naked Earth is a powerfully moving, Balzacian tale that follows two young student cadres, Liu Ch’uen and Su Nan, who fall in love during a time when, as Chang writes, “the whole country lay stretched out like an open palm, ready to close around any one person at any minute.” Mao’s land reform movement is in full force when Liu and Su Nan arrive at a farm to help the peasants take over the fields. The work is hard, the nights  long, and spies abound. Liu is eventually imprisoned by his enemies and sent to fight on the Korean front. But both Liu and Su Nan harbor festering secrets that are pulling them apart. A romance, a thrilling drama, a tragedy, Naked Earth is a stunning work of twentieth-century fiction by one of China’s most revered modern novelists.

    Stick Out Your Tongue is a revelation: a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and violent, seductive and perverse.In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover on the wall of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between dream and reality becomes confused.When this book was published in Chinese in 1997, the government accused Ma Jian of "harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities," and a blanket ban was placed on his future work. With its publication in English, including a new afterword by the author that sets the book in its personal and political context, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes--and a window on the imagination of one of China's foremost writers.

    These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness—save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self. Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China engages existential questions of identity, humanity, love and morality with whimsy and stylistic verve.

    Some stories have won awards; some have been included in various 'Year's Best' anthologies; some have been well reviewed by critics and readers; and some are simply Ken's personal favorites. Many of the authors collected here (with the obvious exception of Liu Cixin) belong to the younger generation of 'rising stars'.In addition, three essays at the end of the book explore Chinese science fiction. Liu Cixin's essay, The Worst of All Possible Universes and The Best of All Possible Earths, gives a historical overview of SF in China and situates his own rise to prominence as the premier Chinese author within that context. Chen Qiufan's The Torn Generation gives the view of a younger generation of authors trying to come to terms with the tumultuous transformations around them. Finally, Xia Jia, who holds the first Ph.D. issued for the study of Chinese SF, asks What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?.

    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 “accident” 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, and avoids 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 ago. 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.

    Will the Old Man understand and help us once again?' The Old Man of the Moon is Shen Fu's intimate and moving account of his marriage - from early passion to the trials of poverty and separation - and his great, enduring love for his wife in eighteenth-century China.

     Hunting a murderer in the seething mass of people shopping in the North West's biggest shopping centre, Lizzie finds herself trapped in a glass lift with four other people when it suddenly stops between floors.A young girl looking ready to give birth at any moment begins to panic, an old man tries to take charge whilst the other captives in the lift, an engaged couple whose relationship worries Lizzie, are desperate to get out.The lights go out, the shopping centre is evacuated. Lizzie has to rely on her wits to keep everyone calm and get the lift down to safety without alerting the murderer that she's onto them.

    Illustrated with woodcuts.With black-and-white drawings throughoutPart of the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

    Xiaolu’s first novel in English is an utterly original journey of self-discovery.

    Next to him a piece of paper unfolds like the wings of a butterfly, and on it is an image that Jia Jia can't forget.Profoundly troubled by what she has seen, even while she is abruptly released from a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia embarks on a journey to discover the truth of the sketch. Starting at her neighbourhood bar, with its brandy and vinyl, and fuelled by anger, bewilderment, curiosity and love, Jia Jia travels deep into her past in order to arrive at her future.Braised Pork is a cinematic, often dreamlike evocation of nocturnal Beijing and the high plains of Tibet, and an exploration of myth-making, loss, and a world beyond words, which ultimately sees a young woman find a new and deeper sense of herself.

    In One Man's Bible, Gao gives us a profound meditation on a life marked by personal and political trauma. The nameless narrator of the novel -- which begins in contemporary Hong Kong -- is clearly Gao himself. In the intimate aftermath of a sexual encounter, Gao revisits the central moments of his life, traveling, in memory, to the Beijing of his childhood, a childhood scarred at the age of ten by his mother's accidental drowning. From emblematic moments like this, Gao's memory ranges across time and space, gradually illuminating the nature of life before, during, and after China's disastrous Cultural Revolution. Gao Xingjian is one of the most eloquent, authoritative voices of 20th-century China, and his personal, political, and aesthetic musings shine a light on a world that very few Westerners have ever truly understood. Ultimately, through his honesty and his artistry, Gao locates the common ground connecting us all in this memorable, universal novel about "the perplexities of being human." Bill Sheehan

    To push past the worries of death and try to continue on. Could you survive while frozen in your deepest fears? Find out what happens next in the tales of INFESTED.

    A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs . . . Can Xue is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The stories in this striking and lyrical new collection-- populated by old married couples, children, cats, and nosy neighbors, the entire menagerie of the everyday-- reaffirm Can Xue's reputation as one of the most innovative Chinese writers in a generation.

    Patrick Hanan praises the volume as -the highest achievement in the contemporary Chinese story.- Henry Miller considers Pai Hsien-yung -a master of portraiture.- Stories from this collection have already been translated into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese and Korean.

    The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands, and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences. The Garlic Ballads is a powerful vision of life under the heel of an inflexible and uncaring government. It is also a delicate story of love between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend—and the struggle to maintain that love despite overwhelming obstacles.