His is a uniquely coveted skill, yet it is one of the few options open to the visually impaired in China. When he loses his life savings on the stock market he returns to his provincial hometown, fiancée in tow, to work for an old classmate. But the transition is not easy as Wang struggles to deal with his own career frustration, his brother's gambling troubles, and the pressures of pleasing his wife-to-be.His fellow workers have their own stories: Duhong is a former pianist whose striking beauty goes undetected by her blind colleagues; strong-headed Jin Yan travels cross-country in pursuit of a man she has never met; and Xiao Kong hides her relationship with Wang Daifu from her parents. Together these fiercely independent people are united by the challenges of their shared disability. Amid growing uncertainty, this community of diverse individuals supports one another unfailingly as they navigate their world of darkness.This stunning portrayal of disability and the strength of human character is a rare glimpse into a small yet very real component of Chinese society, from one of China's most acclaimed contemporary authors.

    In the height of summer she stands madly on the bridge. Until a young female doctor, bewitched by the beauty of the mad woman's dress, plots to take it from her, with tragic consequences.

    Buck.In the small southern town of Chin-kiang, in the last days of the nineteenth century, two young girls bump heads and become thick as thieves. Willow is the only child of a destitute family, Pearl the headstrong daughter of zealous Christian missionaries. She will ultimately become the internationally renowned author Pearl S. Buck, but for now she is just a girl embarrassed by her blonde hair and enchanted by her new Chinese friend. The two embark on a friendship that will sustain both of them through one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history. Moving out into the world together, the two enter the intellectual fray of the times, share love interests and survive early marriages gone bad. Their shared upbringing inspires Pearl's novels, which celebrate the life of the Chinese peasant and will eventually earn her both a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize. But when a civil war erupts between the Nationalists and Communists, Pearl is forced to flee the country just ahead of angry mobs. Willow, despite close ties to Mao’s inner circle, is punished for loyalty to her 'cultural imperialist' friend. And yet, through love and loss, heartbreak and joy, exile and imprisonment, the two women remain intimately entwined. In this ambitious new novel, Anchee Min brings to life a courageous and passionate woman who is now hailed in China as a modern heroine. Like nothing before it, Pearl of China tells the story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, from the perspective of the people she loved and of the land she called home.

    Happy news? Not in China, with its one-child policy. It is a crime. What is she to do? Her only option is divorcing before the second child is born.“Once the baby has entered into the household registry, we’ll marry again. The baby will be born after the divorce, so we’ll each have one child when we marry again. No law says couples with one child can’t marry.” Perfect! Except that after the divorce, Qin marries . . . another woman who is expecting a baby. Mad with rage, Li runs to the judge, begging him to declare the divorce a sham so she may remarry and truly divorce the fool!Liu’s politically charged plot reads like an absurd and hilarious comedy, but couched in his fiction is a harsh indictment of China’s one-child law and a head-on critique of China’s corrupt system. I Did Not Kill My Husband is storytelling and satire of the highest order, sharp-edged and ironic.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    The novel follows Peony, a Chinese bondmaid of the prominent Jewish family of Ezra ben Israel's, and shows through her eyes how the Jewish community was regarded in Kaifeng at a time when most of the Jews had come to think of themselves as Chinese.

    After he marries a woman he had seen eight years earlier, the story becomes, on one level, an analogy between his temporary sexual impotence and the position of intellectuals. A year later he is ready to abandon his wife and escape from the camp. Cameo appearances by philosophic and literary figures (Marx and Meng-tz, Othello and Song Ji) and discussing China and sex allow the incorporation of non-novelistic elements while indulging in gallows humor.

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

    A "sensuous and disquieting new novel" [New York Times] from one of China's most acclaimed novelists, the award-winning screenwriter of Joan Chen's film Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl.The Lost Daughter of Happiness is an epic and moving love story of individuals intoxicated with one another and yet repeatedly separated by prejudice and mistrust. The novel chronicles the lives of the main characters over decades against a backdrop of social turmoil--the anti-Chinese hysteria that plagued San Francisco.

    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.

    She ruled China for decades and brought a medieval empire into the modern age. At the age of sixteen, in a nationwide selection for royal consorts, Cixi was chosen as one of the emperor’s numerous concubines. When he died in 1861, their five-year-old son succeeded to the throne. Cixi at once launched a palace coup against the regents appointed by her husband and made herself the real ruler of China—behind the throne, literally, with a silk screen separating her from her officials who were all male.In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, the telegraph and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like “death by a thousand cuts” and put an end to foot-binding. She inaugurated women’s liberation and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China. Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot.Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer rebellions, wars with France and Japan—and an invasion by eight allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs—one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eyewitness accounts, this biography will revolutionize historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s—and the world’s—history. Packed with drama, fast paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.

    A long-standing favorite of English speaking tourists and visitors, Chinglish is now quickly becoming a culture relic: in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government was determined to wipe out incorrect English usage.

    For the women, the contest is deadly serious, a perilous game of economic survival that, if played well, can set them up for life as mistresses of the rich and prominent. There is no room for error, however: erotic power is hard to achieve and harder to maintain, especially in the loftiest social circles. Enter veteran seducer, Magic Gourd, formerly one of Shanghai’s “Top Ten Beauties” and now the advisor and attendant of Violet, an aspiring but inexperienced courtesan. Violet may have the youth and the allure, but Magic Gourd has the cunning and the knowledge without which the younger woman is sure to fail. These ancient tricks of the trade aren't written down, though; to pass them on to her student, Magic Gourd must reach back into her own professional past, bringing her lessons alive with stories and anecdotes from a career spent charming and manipulating men who should have known better but rarely did.The world of sexual intrigue that Tan reveals in "Rules for Virgins" actually existed once, and she spares no detail in recreating it. But this story is more than intriguing (and sometimes shocking) historical literary fiction. Besides inviting us inside a life that few writers but Tan could conjure up, the intimate confessions of Magic Gourd add up to a kind of military manual for the War of the Sexes’ female combatants. The wisdom conveyed is ancient, specific, and timeless, exposing the workings of vanity and folly, calculation and desire that define the mysterious human heart.

    Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two brothers riding the dizzying roller coaster of life in a newly capitalist world. As comically mismatched teenagers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne’er-do-well, and Song Gang, his bookish, sensitive stepbrother, vow that they will always be brothers--a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China. Their tribulations play out across a richly populated backdrop that is every bit as vibrant: the rapidly-changing village of Liu Town, full of such lively characters as the self-important Poet Zhao, the craven dentist Yanker Yu, the virginal town beauty (turned madam) Lin Hong, and the simpering vendor Popsicle Wang.With sly and biting humor, combined with an insightful and compassionate eye for the lives of ordinary people, Yu Hua shows how the madness of the Cultural Revolution has transformed into the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a monumental spectacle and a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time.

    His power is growing, and his duel with the ice mage Yu Ang looms just ahead, as well as graduation. Afterward, there is the grand prospect of Magic University awaiting him! Unbeknownst to him, other dark currents are moving in the background, and his duel is the trigger that will set off a storm of blood, as the result opens the door to events that will encompass all of Bo City! Mo Fan's character as a sometimes total blockhead stays true, even as the world turns topsy-turvy around him, and he starts preparing to take his first steps out beyond the world of Bo City!

    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.