Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation by Ni Zhen, translated by Chris Berry [in AsianWeek]
01 Jan, by in Adult Readers, Chinese, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation
A thoroughly enjoyable combination of memoir entwined with film, social, and political history by a professor from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy, which graduated the...
Delightful debut about two teenage boys sent to be “re-educated” during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their love for a local village girl and banned western literature.
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Intriguing, disturbing short story collection from the author of haunting Red Sorghum.
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Perhaps the biggest news in translated Asian titles is the rebirth of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, translated for the third time into English, this...
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Hats off to Columbia University Press for being the über-publisher of translated titles year, including The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, which happens to be the first comprehensive...
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In a new translation by Xie’s own daughter Lily Chia Brissman and Barry Brissman, this autobiography gives a fresh new voice to a revolutionary Chinese woman who lived almost the entire 20th century –...
A worthy compilation of hundreds of poems by some 50 poets that highlights the diversity of Taiwanese poetry spanning the 20th century.
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From one of Taiwan’s best-known writers, Apples is a superb collection filled with sharp, resonating stories about simple native folk surviving day to day, fighting poverty and isolation.
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Original Japanese Gen-Xer Banana Yoshimoto's Asleep offers a collection of three novellas, each about a young woman disconnected somehow to her present reality, finding relief and release only through sleep. We could all probably use a...
The latest in genius A Wild Sheep-creator Murakami’s repertoire of dreamy, mystical reveries, this time about the disappearance of the narrator’s quirky, unsettled writer friend.
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The unpredictable Murakami deftly forays into nonfiction with an eerily unput-downable compilation of eyewitness accounts of what happened on March 20, 1995 when members of a religious cult unleashed deadly sarin gas on a crowded rush-hour...
A master of disturbing, psychologically complex stories, Yoshimura's On Parole chronicles the release of a man from a life sentence for having murdered his wife, wounding her lover, and inadvertently killing the lover’s mother.
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Fabulous, dark love story of twisted sorts between a Chinese prostitute and a young white boy during the brutal days of late 1800s San Francisco.
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One Man's Justice, the third book by bestselling Japanese author Akira Yoshimura to be translated into English, is all about perspective: One man's justice proves to be his condemnation. Takuya, an officer in the Japanese Imperial...
A disturbing tale of a 12-year-old city boy's induction into power within a provincial fifth-grade classroom. And you thought kids today grow up too fast!
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