by Lu Min Translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman and Helen Wang Under the stench of factory skies, two single parents and their four teenaged children gather together for Saturday dinners. But can widowed accountant Su Qin ever publicly acknowledge her socially-mismatched relationship with Ding Bogang, a laid-off manual worker? Can she bear to see her ambitious and studious…
by Tsering Yangkyi Translated from the Tibetan by Christopher Peacock Winner of English Pen Award Flowers of Lhasa is a stark and urgent tale of four young women thrown into the seedy underbelly of a sacred city undergoing rapid change. After coming to the big city to look for work, a tragedy befalls Drölkar and leads her to a nightclub…
by Yan Ge English Pen Translates Award Set in a fictional town in West China, this is the story of the Duan-Xue family, owners of the lucrative chilli bean paste factory, and their formidable matriarch. As Gran’s eightieth birthday approaches, her middle-aged children get together to make preparations. Family secrets are revealed and long-time sibling rivalries flare up with renewed…
by Zhang Tianyi Translated from the Chinese by David Hull “Satiric brilliance and unusual comic verve.” — C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction In the 1930s, wartime Shanghai is a cosmopolitan metropolis where conmen and dance-hall girls mingle with refugees streaming in from the occupied areas. One of those refugees is Shi Zhaochang. Having read…
2015 English Pen Translates Award; 2016 Financial Times / OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Awards (Longlisted). by Xu Xiaobin Yang Tianyi is a “leftover woman” and under pressure to find a husband. She is attractive and intelligent but knows little of the world, and finally makes a disastrous marriage to a man, Wang Lian. At the end of the 1980s, in Tiananmen…
by Xu Xiaobin With her delightfully evocative prose, Xu Xiaobin presents us with a collection of stories crawling with fraught power dynamics, strange events, and unsettling images. Not only does she write about women, but the worlds around them, the fears that dog them, and the histories that haunt them. Xu’s entangled plots sneak up on the reader and make…
