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The Membranes - A Novel

by Ta-Wei Chi

18,92€ + 10% CARD

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 First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropesâ€"heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologiesâ€"into a sensitive portrait of one young womanâ€™s quest for self-understanding.
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Eyes Of The Sky

by Syaman Rapongan

~~29,74€~~ 26,77€ 10% OFF

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 Syaman Rapongan is a chronicler of his people, the Tao, an Indigenous community who live on Orchid Island near the island of Taiwan. In Eyes of the Sky, he invites readers to learn the ways of this oceanic worldâ€"and to learn to see their own worlds anew through a Tao lens.
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Elephant Herd - A Novel

by Guixing Zhang

~~34,44€~~ 31,00€ 10% OFF

 Elephant Herd is a vivid and captivating novel by the Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) writer Zhang Guixing, whose distinctive style evokes the jungles of Southeast Asia. It is an atmospheric account of a Malaysian Chinese young man’s journey upriver deep into the Sarawak rainforest of northwest Borneo in search of his uncle, the leader of a Communist guerilla group. Venturing through the jungle, the protagonist—largely referred to only as "the boy"—enters a verdant and vertiginous world of wild creatures and political peril. Jumping backward and forward in time, Elephant Herd intermingles fractured, fragmentary episodes with lush, immersive descriptions of the natural world. Its main narrative begins in the 1970s and proceeds to explore the repercussions of Sarawak’s midcentury Communist insurgency. Focusing on the boy, his extended family, and his Indigenous classmate and travel companion, Zhang examines the complex relations among ethnic Chinese, local Malays, and Indigenous peoples. The novel teems with crocodiles, turtles, elephants, and countless other species of flora and fauna; as the boy’s journey progresses, the human and nonhuman worlds begin to blur together and even camouflage themselves as each other. Elegantly translated by Carlos Rojas, Elephant Herd is a hypnotic and compelling work by a major Sinophone writer.
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Puppet Flower - A Novel Of 1867 Formosa

by Chen Yao-Chang

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 In 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, sank off the coast of southern Taiwan. Fourteen sailors reached the shore, where almost all were killed by indigenous people. In retaliation, the United States launched two disastrous military operations against local tribes. Eventually, the U.S. consul to Amoy, Charles Le Gendre, negotiated a treaty with Tauketok, the chief of the eighteen tribes of the area, that secured safe passage for shipwrecked sailors. Yao-Chang Chen’s historical novel Puppet Flower retells the story of the Rover incident, bringing to light its pivotal role in Taiwanese history. Merging documented events and literary imagination, the novel vividly depicts Tauketok, Le Gendre, and other historical figures alongside the story of Butterfly, a young woman of mixed ethnic heritage who serves as an interpreter and mediator during the crisis. Chen deftly reconstructs the multiethnic and multilingual society of southern Taiwan in the second half of the nineteenth century from multiple perspectives, portraying local people’s daily struggles for survival and their interactions with Han Chinese settlers, Qing dynasty bureaucrats, and Western officials, tradesmen, and adventurers. The novel explores nineteenth-century Sino-American and Sino-indigenous relations and emphasizes the centrality of Taiwanese indigenous cultures to the island’s history. A gripping work of historical fiction, Puppet Flower is a powerful revisionist narrative of a formative moment in Taiwan’s past. It was recently adapted into a popular Taiwanese TV miniseries, Seqalu: Formosa 1867.
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Faraway - A Novel

by Lo Yi-Chin

26,49€ + 10% CARD

 In Taiwanese writer Lo Yi-Chin’s Faraway, a fictionalized version of the author finds himself stranded in mainland China attempting to bring his comatose father home. Lo’s father had fled decades ago, abandoning his first family to start a new life in Taiwan. After travel between the two countries becomes politically possible, he returns to visit the son he left behind, only to suffer a stroke. The middle-aged protagonist ventures to China, where he embarks on a protracted struggle with the byzantine hospital regulations while dealing with relatives he barely knows. Meanwhile, back in Taiwan, his wife is about to give birth to their second child. Isolated in a foreign country, Lo mulls over his life, dwelling on his difficult relationship with his father and how becoming a father himself has changed him. Faraway is a powerful meditation on the nature of family and the many ways blood can both unite and divide us. Lo’s depiction of family dynamics and fraught politics contains a keen sense of irony and sensitivity to everyday absurdity. He offers a deft portrayal of the rift between China and Taiwan through an intimate view of a father-son relationship that bridges this divide. One of the most celebrated writers in Taiwan, Lo has been greatly influential throughout the Chinese-speaking world, but his work has not previously been translated into English. Jeremy Tiang’s translation captures Lo’s distinctive voice, mordant wit, and nuanced portrayal of Taiwanese culture.
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Membranes - A Novel

by Chi Ta-Wei

17,21€ + 10% CARD

 It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go.
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Hawk Of The Mind - Collected Poems

by Yang Mu

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 Yang Mu is a towering figure in modern Chinese poetry. His poetic voice is subtle and lyrical, and his work is rich with precise images and crystalline thoughts invoking temporality and remembrance. A bold innovator and superb craftsman, he elegantly combines cosmopolitan experimentation with poetic forms and an allusive reverence for classical Chinese poetry while remaining rooted in his native Taiwan and its colonial history. Hawk of the Mind is a comprehensive collection of Yang Mu’s poetry that presents crucial works from the many stages of his long creative career, rendered into English by a team of distinguished translators. It conveys the complexity and beauty of Yang Mu’s work in a stately and lucid English poetic register that displays his ability to range from meditative to playful and colloquial to archaic. The volume includes an editor’s introduction and definitive commentary that offer insights into the poet’s major themes and motifs, explaining how he draws on deep engagement with Chinese and Western literary traditions, history, and art as well as mythology, philosophy, and music and a profound love for the natural world to create a nuanced and multifaceted artistic universe. It also contains translations of prefaces and afterwords written by Yang Mu for collections of his poetry. Hawk of the Mind demonstrates the breadth and depth of Yang Mu’s oeuvre, illustrating the distinctive style and affective power of a great poet.
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Remains Of Life - A Novel

by Wu He

38,41€ + 10% CARD

 On October 27, 1930, during a sports meet at Musha Elementary School on an aboriginal reservation in the mountains of Taiwan, a bloody uprising occurred unlike anything Japan had experienced in its colonial history. Before noon, the Atayal tribe had slain one hundred and thirty-four Japanese in a headhunting ritual. The Japanese responded with a militia of three thousand, heavy artillery, airplanes, and internationally banned poisonous gas, bringing the tribe to the brink of genocide. Nearly seventy years later, Chen Guocheng, a writer known as Wu He, or "Dancing Crane," investigated the Musha Incident to search for any survivors and their descendants. Remains of Life, a milestone of Chinese experimental literature, is a fictionalized account of the writer''s experiences among the people who live their lives in the aftermath of this history. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style, it contains no paragraph breaks and only a handful of sentences. Shifting among observations about the people the author meets, philosophical musings, and fantastical leaps of imagination, Remains of Life is a powerful literary reckoning with one of the darkest chapters in Taiwan''s colonial history.
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Slow Boat To China And Other Stories

by Kim Chew Ng

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Ng Kim Chew's stories are raw, rural, and rich with the traditions of his native Malaysia. They are also full of humor and spirit, demonstrating a deep appreciation for human ingenuity in the face of poverty, oppression, and exile. Ng Kim Chew creatively captures the riot of cultures that roughly coexist on the Malay Peninsula. In prose that is intimate and atmospheric, these stories depict the struggles of individuals torn between their ancestral and adoptive homes.
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City Of The Queen - A Novel Of Colonial Hong Kong

by Shu-Ching Shih

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 From its beginnings as a pestilent port and colonial backwater, Hong Kong became the "pearl" of a declining British empire, and then ascended to its present status as a gleaming city of commerce. Throughout its history, Hong Kong has been steeped in drama, intrigue, and seismic social shifts. Shih Shu-ching, an acclaimed Taiwanese writer, sets her epic tale of one beautiful and determined woman's family amid this rich and colorful history, capturing in vivid, panoramic detail the unique tensions and atmosphere that characterize the city. Critically praised and long popular in the Chinese-speaking world, City of the Queen is now available for the first time in English. After being kidnapped from her home in rural China, Huang, the novel's heroine, is brought to Hong Kong and sold into prostitution. Thanks to her shrewd, sometimes devious business dealings and unexpected twists of fate, she emerges from these cruel beginnings to become a wealthy landowner. City of the Queen follows the fortunes of Huang's family, including those of her devoutly Christian daughter-in-law, who tries to redeem the sins she believes Huang has committed; her grandson, who becomes the first Chinese judge on the Hong Kong Supreme Court; and her great-granddaughter, a quintessential Hong Kong young woman, who turns her back on family tradition to revel in the pleasures offered by the 1970s and 1980s metropolis. The novel introduces a range of other Chinese and British characters, examining the complicated relationships between colonizer and colonized in a searing and perceptive portrayal of colonialism. There is Adam Smith, the British officer who struggles with the competing seductions of Huang's beauty and British respectability; Qu Yabing, Smith's servant, who despises anything Chinese, yet becomes Huang's lover after she is abandoned by Smith; Colonel White, the sadistic colonial police chief; and Auntie Eleven, a concubine who owns a pawnshop and teaches Huang the secrets of the trade.
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Lost Garden - A Novel

by Ang Li

34,44€ + 10% CARD

 In this eloquent and atmospheric novel, Li Ang further cements her reputation as one of our most sophisticated contemporary Chinese-language writers. The Lost Garden moves along two parallel lines, a family saga and a cat-and-mouse courtship in modern-day Taipei. As the protagonists' romance dulls, they are forced on a quest to rediscover enchantment. The Lost Garden is a moving portrait of the losses incurred as we struggle to hold on to our passions.
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Running Mother And Other Stories

by Songfen Guo

49,01€ + 10% CARD

 Guo Songfen''s short stories are masterful psychological portraits that play with the echoes of history and the nature of identity. One of the few modernists to truly capture the fallout from such events as the February 28th Incident and the White Terror, Guo Songfen illuminates the quiet core of his characters through a spare and immediate style that is at once a symptom and an allegory of the trauma in which they live. In "Running Mother," a man is torn between his fear of abandonment and his guilt over leaving his family, and therefore his symbolic home, behind. "Moon Seal" follows a woman caught between traditional and modern worlds. In "Wailing Moon," a wife learns a shocking secret after her husband''s death, realizing he was never the man she thought him to be. Set in the United States and Taiwan, "Snow Blind" is a multigenerational triptych that portrays the consequences of spiritual malaise, and in "Brightly Shines the Stars Tonight," a general wrestles with issues of memory and self-perception in the final moments before his execution. Guo Songfen''s stories play with the hazards of miscommunication, the malevolence of human will, the arbitrary nature of fate, and the burden of historical circumstance. As the general discovers, life is a game of chess, the outcome of which is never certain though it might be logically designed. Showcasing the best of Taiwan''s modernist style, these stories are not only an indictment of the human condition but also a powerful comment on the experience of postretrocession Taiwan.
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Memories Of Mount Qilai - The Education Of A Young Poet

by Yang Mu

72,86€ + 10% CARD

 Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War. Taken as a whole, these evocative and allusive autobiographical essays provide a personal response to history as Taiwan transitioned from a Japanese colony to the Republic of China. Yang Mu recounts his childhood experiences under the Japanese, life in the mountains in proximity to indigenous people as his family took refuge from the American bombings, his initial encounters and cultural conflicts with Nationalist soldiers recently arrived from mainland China, the subsequent activities of the Nationalist government to consolidate power, and the island''s burgeoning new manufacturing society. Nevertheless, throughout those early years, Yang Mu remained anchored by a sense of place on Taiwan''s eastern coast and amid its coastal mountains, over which stands Mount Qilai like a guardian spirit. This was the formative milieu of the young poet. Yang Mu seized on verse to develop a distinct persona and draw meaning from the currents of change reshuffling his world. These eloquent essays create an exciting, subjective realm meant to transcend the personal and historical limitations of the individual and the end of culture, "plundered and polluted by politics and industry long ago."
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From The Old Country - Stories And Sketches Of China And Taiwan

by Lihe Zhong

39,74€ + 10% CARD

 Zhong Lihe's fictional portraits unfold on Japanese battlefields and in Peking slums, as well as in the remote, impoverished hill-country villages and farms of his native Hakka districts. His scenic descriptions are deft and atmospheric, and his psychological explorations are acute. The first anthology to present his work in English, this volume features two novellas, ten short stories, and four short prose works.
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Love And Revolution - A Novel About Song Qingling And Sun Yat-Sen

by Ping Lu

39,74€ + 10% CARD

 Reimagines the lives of a legendary couple - Sun Yat-sen, known as the "Father of the Chinese Revolution," and his wife, Song Qingling. This novel touches on Sun Yat-sen's tormented political life and Song Qingling's rumored affairs and isolation after her husband's death.
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Frontier Taiwan - An Anthology Of Modern Chinese Poetry

52,99€ + 10% CARD

 Containing translations of nearly 400 poems from 50 poets, this anthology reveals Taiwan's 20th-century transformation in a broad spectrum of themes, forms, and styles: from lyrical meditation to political satire, haiku to concrete poetry, surrealism to postmodernism. The in-depth introduction outlines the development of modern poetry in the unique historical and cultural context of Taiwan.
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Wintry Night

by Qiao Li

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Spanning over half a century, this historical novel traces the fortunes of the Peng family, Hakka Chinese pioneers whose story is entwined with that of their new country. Their struggle for identity mirrors Taiwan's fate after its post Sino-Japanese War colonization.
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City Trilogy - Five Jade Disks, Defenders Of The Dragon City, And Tale Of A Feather

by Hsi-Kuo Chang

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Taiwan's most innovative science fiction writer presents three tales of intrigue, espionage, betrayal, political strife, time travel, and Chinese history and mysticism.
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Wild Kids - Two Novels About Growing Up

by Ta-Chun Chang

37,09€ + 10% CARD

 These two searingly funny and unsettling portraits of teenagers beyond the control and largely beneath the notice of adults in 1980s Taiwan are the first English translations of works by Taiwan's most famous and best-selling literary cult figure.
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Notes Of A Desolate Man

by Chu T'Ien-Wen

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 This postmodern, first-person tale of a contemporary Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences is among the most important novels to emerge from Taiwan in recent memory.
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Three-Legged Horse

by Cheng Cheng Ch'Ing-Wen

33,80€ + 10% CARD

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 These twelve stories represent the best work of respected "nativist" writer Cheng Ch'ing-wen and encompass his major themes: the tensions between men and women, parents and children, city and village, tradition and modernity.
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Last Of The Whampoa Breed - Stories Of The Chinese Diaspora

49,01€ + 10% CARD

 Stories born of the trials and heartache of exile in Taiwan.
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My South Seas Sleeping Beauty - A Tale Of Memory And Longing

by Guixing Zhang

39,74€ + 10% CARD

 Set in the magical jungles of Borneo, this work recounts the life of Su Qi, a troubled, sensitive son of a wealthy family.It presents a deeply evocative exploration of sexuality and identity and a reworking of Chinese and Western myth.
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Taste Of Apples

by Huang Chun-Ming

37,09€ + 10% CARD

 An account of everyday life in rural and small-town Taiwan. This book portrays characters which are generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty.
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