Search Results

ENGLISH

Soft Burial - A Novel

by Fang Fang

~~27,04€~~ 24,34€ 10% OFF

free shipping

 Soft Burial is one of the most remarkableâ€"and most controversialâ€"recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposÃ©, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods.
ENGLISH

Running Flame - A Novel

by Fang Fang

~~26,49€~~ 23,84€ 10% OFF

 "She knew that if she didn’t say her piece, that flame would never be extinguished; even after death, it would continue raging." The Running Flame opens with its protagonist in prison awaiting execution, desperate to give an account of her life. Yingzhi, a girl from the countryside, sees opportunity in the liberal trends sweeping across China. After high school, she joins a song-and-dance troupe, which allows her to travel and opens her eyes to new people and places. But an unplanned pregnancy brings an abrupt end to all her youthful dreams. Trapped in a bad marriage, Yingzhi is driven to desperate measures—and eventually a shocking act of violence. Fang Fang’s explosive short novel inspired widespread social debate in China upon its publication in 2001. In exploring the difficulties of one woman shackled by patriarchal tradition against the backdrop of radical social change, The Running Flame bears witness to widespread experiences of gendered violence and inequality. Fang Fang evocatively captures both the heady feeling of possibility in China’s roaring 1990s and its dark underside, as economic reform unleashed social dislocation in towns and villages. The novel draws loosely from interviews the author conducted with female death row inmates in a Chinese prison. Equal parts social critique and domestic horror, The Running Flame is a gripping, propulsive narrative that shines a light on the struggles of poor women in China’s countryside.
ENGLISH

Soft Burial - A Novel

by Fang Fang

~~33,11€~~ 29,80€ 10% OFF

 Fang Fang’s Soft Burial begins with a mysterious, nameless protagonist. Decades earlier she was pulled out of a river in a state of near-death; upon regaining consciousness, she discovered that her entire memory had been erased. The narrative follows her journey through recovery as she takes a job as a housekeeper in the home of a powerful cadre, marries the doctor who saved her, and starts a family of her own. As the story unfolds, the protective cocoon of amnesia that her subconscious wove around her begins to give way, revealing glimpses of her previous life and the unspeakable trauma that she suffered. Soft Burial is one of the most remarkable—and most controversial—recent works of Chinese literature. Part mystery, part historical fiction, and part social exposé, the novel intercuts different generations, regions, and time periods. First published in 2016, Soft Burial initially received critical acclaim but soon faced a wave of denunciations and was taken off the shelves of bookstores throughout China. Fang Fang challenged the unspoken rules that govern how Chinese writers portray the past by depicting the human costs of the Land Reform Campaign in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and she was attacked for expressing sympathy toward members of the "landlord class." An intimate portrait of historical trauma and the psychological toll of repressed violence, Soft Burial is a landmark in contemporary Chinese fiction.
ENGLISH

Patterns Of The Heart And Other Stories

by Ch'Oe Myongik

~~35,76€~~ 32,18€ 10% OFF

 Korean writer Ch’oe Myngik was a lifelong resident of Pyongyang, a city his short stories masterfully evoke in exquisite modernist prose. His career spanned decades of tumult, from his debut in the 1930s while Korea was under Japanese colonial rule through the Asia-Pacific and Korean Wars and the early years of the Democratic People’s Republic. As Pyongyang transformed from Korea’s second city, peripheral to the Seoul-centered literary scene, into a socialist capital in the late 1940s, Ch’oe briefly ascended to the center of North Korean culture. Despite the vitality and originality of Ch’oe’s writing, Cold War politics and censorship, including South Korea’s anticommunist laws, consigned his work to obscurity. Patterns of the Heart and Other Stories presents a selection of Ch’oe’s short fiction in translation, including later works from hard-to-find North Korean publications. These cinematic, keenly observed tales explore Pyongyang in meticulous detail, depicting the city’s transformations and the conflicts between old and new. They pay close attention to the lives of the disaffected and the marginalized: a drifter confronts a former revolutionary dying of opium addiction; a sex worker is trafficked across the border aboard a train, amid the indifference of her fellow passengers. Later stories provide a striking glimpse of the Korean War—the occupation of Pyongyang, U.S. fighter jets bombing civilian refugees, guerrilla heroics—from a North Korean perspective. Hidden treasures of world literature, these stories offer new perspectives on Korea’s turbulent twentieth century, across political divides still in place today.
ENGLISH

Narrow Cage And Other Modern Fairy Tales

by Vasily Eroshenko

35,76€ + 10% CARD

 Vasily Eroshenko was one of the most remarkable transnational literary figures of the early twentieth century: a blind multilingual Esperantist from Ukraine who joined left-wing circles in Japan and befriended the famous modernist writer Lu Xun in China. Born in a small Ukrainian village in imperial Russia, he was blinded at a young age by complications from measles. Seeking to escape the limitations imposed on the blind, Eroshenko became a globe-trotting storyteller. He was well known in Japan and China as a social activist and a popular writer of political fairy tales that drew comparisons to Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde. The Narrow Cage and Other Modern Fairy Tales presents a selection of Eroshenko’s stories, translated from Japanese and Esperanto, to English readers for the first time. These fables tell the stories of a religiously disillusioned fish, a jealous paper lantern, a scholarly young mouse, a captive tiger who seeks to liberate his fellow animals, and many more. They are at once inventive and politically charged experiments with the fairy tale genre and charming, lyrical stories that will captivate readers as much today as they did during Eroshenko’s lifetime. In addition to eighteen fairy tales, the book includes semiautobiographical writings and prose poems that vividly evoke Eroshenko’s life and world.
ENGLISH

Fu Ping - A Novel

by Anyi Wang

27,04€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the Peopleâ€™s Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary Chinaâ€™s most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban life.
ENGLISH

Friend - A Novel From North Korea

by Nam-Nyong Paek

22,97€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 Paek Nam-nyongâ€™s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Koreaâ€™s most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.
ENGLISH

Meeting With My Brother - A Novella

by Mun-Yol Yi

17,56€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 Yi Mun-yol's Meeting with My Brother is narrated by a South Korean whose father abandoned his family and defected to the North during the Korean War. Many years later, he is prepared to reunite with his father. When his father dies before a rendezvous can be arranged, he learns that he has a half-brother, whom he chooses to meet instead.
ENGLISH

Who Ate Up All The Shinga? - An Autobiographical Novel

by Wan-Suh Park

24,32€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 Park Wan-suhâ€™s Who Ate Up All the Shinga? is an extraordinary account of growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability. With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life.
ENGLISH

Catalog Of Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

by Kai-Cheung Dung

39,74€ + 10% CARD

 Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and develops alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life. Dung’s sketches center on once-trendy items that evoke the world at the turn of the millennium, such as Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy VIII, a Windows 98 disk, a clamshell mobile phone, Air Jordans, and cargo shorts. The protagonist of each piece, typically a young woman, is struck by an odd, even overriding obsession with an object or fad. Characters embark on brief dalliances or relationships lasting no longer than the fashions that sparked them. Dung blends vivid everyday details—Portuguese egg tarts, Japanese TV shows, the Hong Kong subway—with situations that are often fantastical or preposterous. This catalog of vanished products illuminates how people use objects to define and even invent their own selves. A major work from one of Hong Kong’s most gifted and original writers, Dung’s archaeology of the end of the twentieth century speaks to perennial questions about consumerism, nostalgia, and identity.
ENGLISH

Table For One - Stories

by Yun Ko-Eun

~~26,49€~~ 23,84€ 10% OFF

 An office worker who has no one to eat lunch with enrolls in a course that builds confidence about eating alone. A man with a pathological fear of bedbugs offers up his body to save his building from infestation. A time capsule in Seoul is dug up hundreds of years before it was intended to be unearthed. A vending machine repairman finds himself trapped in a shrinking motel during a never-ending snowstorm. In these and other indelible short stories, contemporary South Korean author Yun Ko-eun conjures up slightly off-kilter worlds tucked away in the corners of everyday life. Her fiction is bursting with images that toe the line between realism and the fantastic. Throughout Table for One, comedy and an element of the surreal are interwoven with the hopelessness and loneliness that pervades the protagonists’ decidedly mundane lives. Yun’s stories focus on solitary city dwellers, and her eccentric, often dreamlike humor highlights their sense of isolation. Mixing quirky and melancholy commentary on densely packed urban life, she calls attention to the toll of rapid industrialization and the displacement of traditional culture. Acquainting the English-speaking audience with one of South Korea’s breakout young writers, Table for One presents a parade of misfortunes that speak to all readers in their unconventional universality.
ENGLISH

Sachiko - A Novel

by Shusaku Endo

37,09€ + 10% CARD

 In novels such as Silence, End Shsaku examined the persecution of Japanese Christians in different historical eras. Sachiko, set in Nagasaki in the painful years between 1930 and 1945, is the story of two young people trying to find love during yet another period in which Japanese Christians were accused of disloyalty to their country. In the 1930s, two young Japanese Christians, Sachiko and Shhei, are free to play with American children in their neighborhood. But life becomes increasingly difficult for them and other Christians after Japan launches wars of aggression. Meanwhile, a Polish Franciscan priest and former missionary in Nagasaki, Father Maximillian Kolbe, is arrested after returning to his homeland. End alternates scenes between Nagasaki—where the growing love between Sachiko and Shhei is imperiled by mounting persecution—and Auschwitz, where the priest has been sent. Shhei’s dilemma deepens when he faces conscription into the Japanese military, conflicting with the Christian belief that killing is a sin. With the A-bomb attack on Nagasaki looming in the distance, End depicts ordinary people trying to live lives of faith in a wartime situation that renders daily life increasingly unbearable. End’s compassion for his characters, reflecting their struggles to find and share love for others, makes Sachiko one of his most moving novels.
ENGLISH

Friend - A Novel From North Korea

by Paek Nam-Nyong

26,49€ + 10% CARD

 Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend is a tale of marital intrigue, abuse, and divorce in North Korea. A woman in her thirties comes to a courthouse petitioning for a divorce. As the judge who hears her statement begins to investigate the case, the story unfolds into a broader consideration of love and marriage. The novel delves into its protagonists’ past, describing how the couple first fell in love and then how their marriage deteriorated over the years. It chronicles the toll their acrimony takes on their son and their careers alongside the story of the judge’s own marital troubles. A best-seller in North Korea, where Paek continues to live and write, Friend illuminates a side of life in the DPRK that Western readers have never before encountered. Far from being a propagandistic screed in praise of the Great Leader, Friend describes the lives of people who struggle with everyday problems such as marital woes and workplace conflicts. Instead of socialist-realist stock figures, Paek depicts complex characters who wrestle with universal questions of individual identity, the split between public and private selves, the unpredictability of existence, and the never-ending labor of maintaining a relationship. This groundbreaking translation of one of North Korea’s most popular writers offers English-language readers a page-turner full of psychological tension as well as a revealing portrait of a society that is typically seen as closed to the outside world.
ENGLISH

The Handsome Monk And Other Stories

by Tsering Dondrup

94,63€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 Tsering DÃ¶ndrup is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors writing in Tibetan today. The Handsome Monk and Other Stories brings together short stories from across Tsering DÃ¶ndrupâ€™s career to create a panorama of Tibetan society.
ENGLISH

Handsome Monk And Other Stories

by Tsering Dondrup

29,14€ + 10% CARD

 Tsering Döndrup is one of the most popular and critically acclaimed authors writing in Tibetan today. In a distinct voice rich in black humor and irony, he describes the lives of Tibetans in contemporary China with wit, empathy, and a passionate sense of justice. The Handsome Monk and Other Stories brings together short stories from across Tsering Döndrup’s career to create a panorama of Tibetan society. With a love for the sparse yet vivid language of traditional Tibetan life, Tsering Döndrup tells tales of hypocritical lamas, crooked officials, violent conflicts, and loyal yaks. His nomad characters find themselves in scenarios that are at once strange and familiar, satirical yet poignant. The stories are set in the fictional county of Tsezhung, where Tsering Döndrup’s characters live their lives against the striking backdrop of Tibet’s natural landscape and go about their daily business to the ever-present rhythms of Tibetan religious life. Tsering Döndrup confronts pressing issues: the corruption of religious institutions; the indignities and injustices of Chinese rule; poverty and social ills such as gambling and alcoholism; and the hardships of a minority group struggling to maintain its identity in the face of overwhelming odds. Ranging in style from playful updates of traditional storytelling techniques to narrative experimentation, Tsering Döndrup’s tales pay tribute to the resilience of Tibetan culture.
ENGLISH

Sacred Cesium Ground And Isa'S Deluge - Two Novellas Of Japan''S 3/11 Disaster

by Kimura Yusuke

27,81€ + 10% CARD

 In these two novellas, Kimura Ysuke explores human and animal life in northern Japan after the natural and nuclear disasters of March 11, 2011. Kimura inscribes the "Triple Disaster" into a rich regional tradition of storytelling, incorporating far-flung voices and experiences to testify to life and the desire to represent it in the aftermath of calamity. In Sacred Cesium Ground, a woman from Tokyo travels to volunteer at a cattle farm known as the "Fortress of Hope," tending irradiated animals abandoned after the reactor meltdown. The farm closely resembles an actual ranch that has been widely covered in Japan, and the story’s portrayal of those who stubbornly care for animals in spite of the danger speaks to the sense of futility and meaningfulness in the wake of traumatic events. Isa’s Deluge depicts a family of fishermen whose crotchety patriarch draws on old tales of the floods that have plagued the region to fashion himself as the father of the tsunami. Together, the novellas present often-unheard voices of one of Japan’s peripheral regions and their anger toward the government and Tokyo for mishandling and forgetting their part of the country. Kimura’s command of dialect and conversational language is masterfully translated by Doug Slaymaker. Postapocalyptically surreal yet teeming with life, Kimura’s stories will be a revelation for readers looking for a new perspective on the disaster’s consequences for Japan and on the interrelated meanings of human and animal lives and deaths.
ENGLISH

Dust And Other Stories

by T'Aejun Yi

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 Yi T’aejun was one of twentieth-century Korea’s true masters of the short story—and a man who in 1946 stunned his contemporaries by moving to the Soviet-occupied northern zone of his country. In South Korea, where he is known today as "one who went north," Yi’s work was banned until 1988. His momentous decision did not lead him to a safe haven, however: though initially welcomed into the literary establishment, North Korea sent him into internal exile in the 1950s, and little is known of his fate. Dust and Other Stories offers a selection of Yi’s stories across time and place, showcasing a superb stylist caught up in the midst of his era’s most urgent ideological and aesthetic divides. This collection unites his earlier modernist masterpieces from the colonial era with his little-known work penned during North Korea’s founding years, offering a rare glimpse into the making—and crossing—of the border between south and north. During the turbulent final years of Japanese rule, Yi’s elegant yet subdued stories championed both his native tongue and the belief in the capacity of art. In the heavily politicized environment of the North, his later works maintain a faith in the art of storytelling and a concern for the disappearance of customs in the throes of modernization. Throughout both eras, Yi focused on ordinary people: old men struggling to understand a changing world, lovers meeting up among ancient ruins, a lively widow targeted by a literacy campaign, a bourgeois couple trying to sustain themselves during the war by breeding rabbits, and more. Magnificently translated by Janet Poole, Yi’s work bears witness to global turmoil with a melancholic sense of enduring beauty.
ENGLISH

Reincarnated Giant - An Anthology Of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction

52,99€ + 10% CARD

 A new wave of Chinese science fiction is here. This golden age has not only resurrected the genre but also subverted its own conventions. Going beyond political utopianism and technological optimism, contemporary Chinese writers conjure glittering visions and subversive experiments—ranging from space opera to cyberpunk, utopianism to the posthuman, and parodies of China’s rise to deconstructions of the myth of national development. This anthology showcases the best of contemporary science fiction from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the People’s Republic of China. In fifteen short stories and novel excerpts, The Reincarnated Giant opens a doorway into imaginary realms alongside our own world and the history of the future. Authors such as Lo Yi-chin, Dung Kai-cheung, Han Song, Chen Qiufan, and the Hugo winner Liu Cixin—some alive during the Cultural Revolution, others born in the 1980s—blur the boundaries between realism and surrealism, between politics and technology. They tell tales of intergalactic war; decoding the last message sent from an extinct human race; the use of dreams as tools to differentiate cyborgs and humans; poets’ strange afterlife inside a supercomputer; cannibalism aboard an airplane; and unchecked development that leads to uncontrollable catastrophe. At a time when the Chinese government promotes the "Chinese dream," the dark side of the new wave shows a nightmarish unconscious. The Reincarnated Giant is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of the genre.
ENGLISH

In Black And White - A Novel

by Jun'Ichiro. Tanizaki

31,79€ + 10% CARD

 Jun'ichiro Tanizaki's In Black and White is a literary murder mystery in which the lines between fiction and reality are blurred. The writer Mizuno has penned a story about the perfect murder that comes to intrude on his life. In Black and White is a masterful yet little-known novel from a great writer at the height of his powers.
ENGLISH

Sunset - A Ch''Ae Manshik Reader

by Manshik Ch'Ae

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Châ€™ae Manshik is one of the most accomplished writers of modern Korea yet is underrepresented in English translation because of the challenges posed by his distinctive voice and colloquial style.
ENGLISH

Beasts Head For Home? - A Novel

by Kobo Abe

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 In the aftermath of World War II, a Japanese youth raised in the puppet state of Manchuria struggles to return home to Japan. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries of human behavior from an exceptional modern Japanese author.
ENGLISH

Meeting With My Brother - A Novella

by Mun-Yol Yi

19,86€ + 10% CARD

 Yi Mun-yol's Meeting with My Brother is a sobering yet hopeful depiction of the volatile relationship between the divided Koreas. Yi, the narrator, is a South Korean university professor searching for his father, who defected to the North at the outbreak of war. Instead he finds his half-brother, and their tense meeting takes a surprising turn.
ENGLISH

Courtesans And Opium - Romantic Illusions Of The Fool Of Yangzhou

by Anonymous

40,56€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 A chilling tale of seduction and vice set in the illiciit world of nineteenth-century China.
ENGLISH

Beasts Head For Home? - A Novel

by Kobo Abe

29,74€ + 10% CARD

free shipping

 In the aftermath of World War II, a Japanese youth raised in the puppet state of Manchuria struggles to return home to Japan. What follows is a wild journey involving drugs, smuggling, chases, and capture. Beasts Head for Home is an acute novel of identity, belonging, and the vagaries of human behavior from an exceptional modern Japanese author.
Loading results...

View more results