A magical, impressionistic autobiography by China’s legendary poet Bei DaoIn 2001, to visit his sick father, the exiled poet Bei Dao returned to his homeland for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. “My city that once was had vanished,” he writes: “I was a foreigner in my hometown.” The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions that sparked Open Up, City Gate. In this lyrical autobi...

A lyrical masterpiece by the renowned poet with a “Whitman-like rhetorical immensity coupled with a passionately eccentric sensibility” (Carol Muske Dukes, Los Angeles Times)A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2024A 2024 NPR BOOK WE LOVEA NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZESidetracks, Bei Dao’s first new collection...

Die Texte (größtenteils Erstveröffentlichungen) widmen sich poetischen Identitätsspielen. Welcher Zauber liegt im Spiel der Identitäten, im Wandel der Formen? Wie wirken Literatur, Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit aufeinander? Was können die Figuren des Dritten versprechen, die sich zwischen Kulturen, Ethnien, Geschlechtern und Sprachen bewegen? Yoko Tawada stellte das Thema, schrieb selbst einen literarischen Essay und gibt diesen Band der Reih heraus. Beiträge von renommierten Autor*innen...

An eye-opening account of life inside North Korea—a closed world of increasing global importance—hailed as a “tour de force of meticulous reporting” (The New York Review of Books), with a new afterword that revisits these stories—and North Korea more broadly—in 2022, in the wake of the pandemicNATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALISTIn this landmark addition to the literature of totalitarianism, aw...

The bestselling author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals returns with a sharply observed, hilarious account of his adventures in China—a complex, fascinating country with enough dangers and delicacies to keep him, and readers, endlessly entertained.Maarten Troost has charmed legions of readers with his laugh-out-loud tales of wandering the remote islands of the South Pacific. When the travel bug hit again, he decided to go big-time, taking on the world’s most ...

"Destined to become a classic" (Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking), this harrowing memoir of life inside North Korea was the first account to emerge from the notoriously secretive country -- and it remains one of the most terrifying.Amid escalating nuclear tensions, Kim Jong-un and North Korea's other leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party state, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its bruta...

A New York Times Notable book, this memoir by a journalist who lived in a small city in China is "a vivid and touching tribute to a place and its people" ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remar...

One of the Nobel Prize Winners in LiteratureIdeal for fans of Chinese Playground, We Are Party People, Death of Me, Skate with Me, A Farmer’s Life for Me, and similar worksWritten by today’s most revered, controversial, and feared Chinese novelistMo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a remarkable story. The absurd, real, comical, and tragic are combined into a fantastic read. The hero—or antihero—is Ximen Nao, a landowner k...

In the tradition of The Concubine's Children and Paper Shadows, a probing memoir from the author of the acclaimed novel Midnight at the Dragon Cafe.An elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family's difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter's search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents' past lives.Growing up in her father's hand laundry in small town Ontario, Judy Fong Bates listened to stories of ...

Publicly burned in China for its sensual nature and irreverent style, this novel is the semi-autobiographical story of Coco, a café waitress, who is full of enthusiasm and impatience for life. She meets a young man, Tian Tian, for whom she feels tenderness and love, but he is reclusive, impotent and an increasing user of drugs. Despite parental objections, Coco moves in with him, leaves her job and throws herself into writing.Shortly afterwards she meets Mark, a married Westerner. ...

In 2006, the Prime Minister apologized to the Chinese people for the legislated discrimination created by Canada’s head tax laws in the first half of the twentieth century, acknowledging the far-reaching and long-term consequences it has had on their families. A Cowherd in Paradise is the story of one such family.The book chronicles the remarkable lives of Wong Guey Dang (1902–1983) and Jiang Tew Thloo (1911–2002). Ah Dang was born into an impoverished family and sold as a...

Two girls come of age during the horrors of China's Cultural Revolution in this novel by the national bestselling author of Empress Orchid.The young and beautiful Wild Ginger is only in elementary school, but has already survived hell through her sheer iron will. Singled out by the Red Guards for her "foreign-colored eyes," she has seen her deceased father branded a traitor and her mother commit suicide under the oppressive weight of persecution. But the y...