John Balcom

A dual-language edition of Chinese stories-featuring many stories appearing in English for the first time. Here is the perfect introduction to contemporary fiction from the world's most spoken langu

Few people beyond the shores of Taiwan are aware that it is home to a population of indigenous peoples who for more than fifteen thousand years have lived on the island. Over the years, through the Ch

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

A farmer and environmentalist poet who writes of rural life in Taiwan in simple, colloquial poems that depict his vanishing world.Wu Sheng has written vivid poems about rural life and the land since t

A seminal work from the second wave of Chinese modernism.So great is Ya Hsien's influence on younger generations of Taiwanese and Chinese writers that he is sometimes referred to simply as "The P

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 heterog

Xiang Yang's poetry stands as elegant testimony to the Taiwan experience. From start to finish, the collection is an articulation of Taiwan's identity imbued with salient cultural details.The range an

Huang Fan burst onto Taiwan's literary scene in the 1980s, publishing pointed urban portraits and political satires that captured the reading public's attention. After decades of innovative work, he i

Searching, Escaping, and Longing for True Love. Set in Dunhuang, China, a city on the ancient Silk Road and home to thousands of painted cave murals, Dunhuang Dream magically blends the stories of thr

A companion volume to Lo Fu’s book-length poem Driftwood (Zephyr Press, 2006), Stone Cell compiles writing from every decade of his celebrated literary career.“Beyond Logic&rdq

Set among a remote cluster of cave dwellings in Shanxi province, "There's Nothing I Can Do When I Think of You Late at Night" is a genre-defying expos? of rural communism. In a series of vivid, interl

Traces of Rilke are unearthed in Lo Fu’s long poem sequence, Driftwood, along with his affection for surrealism and the early modernists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire and the more contemporary verse of Wallace Stevens. On New Year’s Day 2001, the poem appeared in the literary supplement to the Liberty Times in Taiwan and was serialized for three months straight. Lo Fu has won almost every literary award in Taiwan and has published more than three dozen volumes of poetry, essays, criticism and translations. Despite his prolific output, Lo Fu considers Driftwood to be the book that sums up his experience of exile, his artistic explorations and his metaphysics; Driftwood is a personal epic and the greatest achievement of his old age.Lo Fu is the pen name of Mo Luofu, who was born in Hengyang, Hunan Province, in 1928. He joined the military during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and moved to Taiwan in 1949. While stationed in southern Taiwan in 1954, he founded the Epoch Poetr

Taiwan's most innovative science fiction writer presents three tales of intrigue, espionage, betrayal, political strife, time travel, and Chinese history and mysticism. After thousands of years of civ

Heralded as a literary masterpiece and a best-seller in the Chinese-speaking world, The Great Flowing River is a personal account of the history of modern China and Taiwan unlike any other. In this el

An epic spanning more than half a century of Taiwan's history, this breathtaking historical novel traces the fortunes of the Pengs, a family of Hakka Chinese settlers, across three generations from th