Black Walls and other stories
By Liu Xinwu
Edited by Don J. Cohn
1990
xiii + 202 pages
ISBN 962-7255-06-8
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.
These stories reveal his remarkable literary versatility and also provide a fascinating insight into the tensions which have shaped Chinese society in recent decades.
'paints a vivid picture of life in the Chinese capital'
—South China Morning Post
'... 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.'
—World Literature Today