One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929–1939

Shao Xunmei, poet, essayist, publisher, and printer, played a signifcant role in the publication and dissemination of journals and pictorial magazines in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s, but this is the first collection of his prose writings to be published in English. The essays in this book, some of which were selected by the writer's daughter, Shao Xiaohong, include long essays such as “One Man Talking” and “A Year in Shanghai” as well as several shorter essays on subjects as diverse as the caricatures of Miguel Covarrubias, woodblock
printing, and pictorial magazines—all of which were published in Shao’s own magazines.

Paul Bevan is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. From 2018–2020, he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum. He is the author of A Modern Miscellany: Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926–1938 (2015) and “Intoxicating Shanghai” — An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age (2020).

Susan Daruvala works in modern Chinese literature and film. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, although now retired from her teaching post in the Department of East Asian Studies. She is the author of Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (2000).