Black Walls and other stories
Black Walls and other stories
By Liu Xinwu
Edited by Don J. Cohn
with an introduction by Geremie Barmé
1990
xiii + 202 pages
ISBN 962-7255-06-8
Liu is attracted in his fiction to the study of modern Peking Man, and this volume reflects some of his faces. At times the works contained herein entertain, they frequently educate or elucidate, and more often than not they tell us as much about their author as the unsettled and changing society which he depicts. These stories reveal his remarkable literary versatility and also provide a fascinating insight into the tensions which have shaped Chinese society in recent decades.
This is the first anthology of his works in English translation.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction — vii
Black Walls — 1
Bus Aria — 15
The Woman with Shoulder-length Hair — 61
The Wish — 73
Zooming in on 19 May 1985 — 147
White Teeth — 177
Translators — 201
Review(s)
Review(s)
'… a welcome addition to the still very scant documentation in English of the relatively more daring literary statements produced in the pre-Tiananmen Incident atmosphere of the late 1980s.'
—Frances LaFleur in World Literature Today
'paints a vivid picture of life in the Chinese capital'
—Philip Leetch in the South China Morning Post
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AUTHOR(s)
Liu Xinwu has been a prominent and acerbic chronicler of Chinese society, as well as one of China's most successful middle-aged writers. Appointed editor of People's Literature, the journal of the Chinese Writers' Association, in 1986, he was dismissed in 1990 due to his role as a sympathetic observer of the 1989 protests.
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TRANSLATOR(s)
Geremie Barmé
Don J. Cohn
Stephen Fleming
Richard Rigby