China Books

First published in China in 1947, this novel's hapless picaresque hero returns from abroad on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War. On the basis of his bogus degree, Fang Hung-chien obtains a teaching post at the newly established San-lu University, and the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian Zhongshu's merciless satire. The theme of besiegement figures prominently throughout this highly structured and polished work, nowhere more tellingly than in the final section which deals with marriage and its disintegration, as traditional expectations clash headlong with the values and pressures of modern life. Both comically exuberant and morally sophisticated, Fortress Besieged is, in the words of the eminent critic C.T.Hsia, 'the most delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature.' It has been translated into French and Russian, but this version (the first in English) has the full endorsement and support of the author. Qian Zhongshu was born into a literary family in Wuhsi, Kiangsu province in 1910. He spent two years at Oxford, where he majored in English and also became conversant with Latin and modern European literatures. He taught at a number of Chinese universities before the Revolution and remained on Mainland after the Communist victory. Since 1952 he has been a senior fellow of the Institute of Literature in the Academy of Social Sciences. (For this item please quote stock ID 23999) ISBN: 9787020042579

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Fiction about Narcotics in China (For this item please quote stock ID 14444) ISBN: 9787506318693

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Literature textbook for University. (For this item please quote stock ID 16580) ISBN: 9787805964317

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This set of 3 includes 150 childhood rhymes, collected in the late 1800s. (For this item please quote stock ID 7839) ISBN: 9780910704731

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~'The ten essays collected here constitute a penetrating and nuanced account of the crucial aspects of aesthetic thought in the Six Dynasties period - a time rich in aesthetic reflection. One strikingly original aspect of the book is its attention not only to aesthetic thinking but also to specific practices informed by such thinking. Chinese Aesthetics will easily become the standard work of reference on this subject and period' - Robert Ford Campany, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University.

~'The ten contributors to this volume are either leading figures in Six Dynasties studies or young scholars with recognised publications on the period. This is an academic dream team, one might say, and the result is most impressive. It is a volume of rare consequence, skillfully opening up for the first time to the English-speaking world a vast terrain of premodern literary and aesthetic activity that is of signal importance' - David Wang, Dean Lung Professor of Chinese Studies, Columbia University.

~This singular work presents the most comprehensive and nuanced studies available in any Western language of Chinese aesthetic thought and practice during the Six Dynasties (A.D. 220-589). Despite a succession of dynastic and social upheavals, the literati preoccupied themselves with both the sensuous and the transcendent and strove for cultural dominance. By the end of the sixth century, their reflections would evolve into a sophisticated system of aesthetic discourse characterised by its own rhetoric and concepts.

~A prologue details the historical context in which Six Dynasties aesthetics arose and sketches out its major stages of development. The ten essays that follow bring fresh perspectives to bear on important writings on literature, music, painting, calligraphy, and gardening. Grounded in close readings of primary texts, they reveal the complex, dynamic interplay between life and art, the sensuous and the metaphysical, and the artistic and the philosophicaleligious that lies at the heart of the aesthetic thought and practice of the time. As a whole, the collection demonstrates that Six Dynasties achieved a sophistication in aesthetic thought comparable in many ways to that of the West: The discussion of disinterestedness in art, aesthetic judgment, and how mental images mediate between the supersensible and the sensible are reminiscent of Kant. The findings of various Chinese critics provide much food for thought in the broad fields of comparative literature and aesthetics.

~Chinese Aesthetics will fill a gap in Western sinological studies of the period. It will appeal to scholars and students in premodern Chinese literary studies, comparative aesthetics, and cultural studies and be a welcome reference to anyone interested in ancient Chinese culture.

~Contributors: Susan Bush, Zong-qi Cai, Kang-i Sun Chang, Ronald Egan, Robert Harrist, Jr., Rania Huntington, Wai-yee Li, Shuen-fu Lin, Victor Mair & François Martin.

~Cai Zong-qi is professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. (For this item please quote stock ID 23313) ISBN: 9780824827915

The characters in this vivid, witty and engrossing novel, set in a Beijing literary institute right after the revolution, are a group of intellectuals from the old society adjusting to a new reality. There is a love story, intrigue, backbiting and deception: familiar circumstances of academic life. But in the end, all must undergo the harrowing ordeal of public confession in the first great purge of the 1950?s. As each responds with subterfuge, terror of humility, they reveal more about their souls than about their politics. Baptism has wide appeal for general readers, especially those with an interest in China, Written in a direct and fast-moving style with vivid characters and universal plot, it will also be a welcome edition to universal courses in modern Chinese literature or Chinese history and politics. Baptism is the only novel written by the distinguished Chinese woman playwright. Essayist, and translator, Yang Jiang. Born in 11911 she has experienced the entire sweep of Chinas turbulent twentieth-century history. Passages from this novel have already been quoted, in English, in books about the period. Her memoir of life during the Cultural Revolution has been translated twice and widely read. About the Author: Yang Jiang , born in 1911, is one of China?s most eminent playwrights, essayists, memoirists and translators. She studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne during the 1930s, then returned to China where for many years she was a member of the Literary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In recent years she has published a translation of Plato?s Phaedo and a memoir of her family, We Three. Baptism is her only novel. It was published in China in 1986, when she was 75 and has been in print ever since (For this item please quote stock ID 29096) ISBN: 9787020063772

In WWII-era Shanghai, Wong Chia Chi is a Chinese college student who gets involved with a drama club after meeting Kuang Yu Min, a charismatic fellow classmate. While Wong is happy performing on the stage, Kuang asks her to take on a very dangerous role in real life. She is to transform herself into Mrs. Mak and make friends with the wife of a major Japanese collaborator, Mr. Yee, only to ensnare him into an affair so that her Kuang and his cohorts can kill him. However, the plan fails to work out at the time, but after several years pass, Kuang re-enters Wong's life, whereupon he asks her to resume their deadly mission. (For this item please quote stock ID 28523) ISBN: 9789573323532

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My Brilliant Career is a 1901 novel by Miles Franklin. It is the first of many novels by Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879-1954), one of the major Australian writers of her time. It was written while she was still a teenager, as a romance to amuse her friends. Franklin submitted the manuscript to Henry Lawson who contributed a preface and took it to his own publishers in Edinburgh. The popularity of the novel in Australia and the perceived closeness of many of the characters to her own family and circumstances as small farmers in New South Wales near Goulburn caused Franklin a great deal of distress and led her to withdrawing the novel from publication until after her death. (For this item please quote stock ID 28879) ISBN: 9787532742134

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The events of the story take place in 1984, with the first volume set between April and June, and the second between July and September.
The narrative is composed of two storylines that alternate by chapter. The book opens with Aomame's perspective as she catches a taxi in Tokyo on her way to a work assignment, noticing that Janacek's Sinfonietta is playing on the radio. When the taxi gets stuck in a traffic jam on the expressway, the driver suggests that she get out of the car and climb down an emergency escape in order to make her important meeting. Aomame makes her way to a hotel in Shibuya, where she poses as a hotel attendant in order to assassinate a hotel guest. She performs the murder with a tool that leaves almost no trace on its victim, leading investigators to conclude that he died a natural death.
As the story unfolds, Aomame has several bizarre experiences, including a string of memories that do not line up with the archives of major newspapers. One of them concerns a group of extremists who are engaged in a standoff with police in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture. Upon reading these articles, she concludes that she must be living in an alternate reality, and suspects that she entered it about the time she heard Sinfonietta on the radio.
The second chapter introduces Tengo, whose mentor Komatsu asks him to rewrite an awkwardly-written but otherwise promising manuscript that had been entered in a literary contest. Komatsu wants to submit the novel to a prestigious literary agency and promote its author as a new literary prodigy. Tengo has reservations about rewriting another author's work, especially that of a high school student. He agrees to do so only upon meeting the original writer, who goes by the strange name "Fukaeri," and asking her permission. Fukaeri, however, seems to care very little what happens to the manuscript, telling Tengo to do as he likes with it.
Soon it becomes clear that Fukaeri, who is dyslexic, neither wrote manuscript on her own nor did she submit it to the contest herself. Tengo's discomfort with the project deepens upon finding out other people must be involved. To address his concerns, Fukaeri takes Tengo to meet her guardian, a man called Ebisuno-sensei, or simply sensei to Fukaeri. Here Tengo learns that Fukaeri's parents were members of a commune called Takashima. Her father, Tamotsu Fukada was Ebisuno's friend and colleague, but they did not see eye-to-eye on this subject. Fukada thought of Takashima as a utopia; Ebisuno, however, describes the commune as a place where people were turned into unthinking robots, saying that it was like something out of the world of George Orwell's novel. Fukaeri, whom Ebisuno-sensei calls Eri, was only a small child at the time; she sits quietly through the discussion, noting only that Takashima was fun.
In 1974, Fukada and 30 members founded a new commune called Sakigake . The young members of the commune work hard under Fukada's leadership, but eventually disagreements split the commune into two factions, and the more radical form a new commune called Akebono, which eventually has a gunfight with police near Lake Motosu in Yamanashi Prefecture.
One day, Fukaeri appears on Ebisuno-sensei's doorstep. She does not speak and will not explain what happened to her. When Ebisuno attempts to contact Fukada at Sakigake, he is told that he is unavailable. Ebisuno thereby becomes Fukaeri's guardian, and by the time of 1Q84's present, they have not heard from her parents for seven years, leading Ebisuno to fear the worst.
It is while living with Ebisuno that Fukaeri composes her story, Kuki Sanagi. Unable to write it herself, she tells it to Azami, Ebisuno's daughter. The story is about a girl's life in a commune, where she met a group of dwarfs, whom Fukaeri refers to as "Little People.
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