China's Avant-Garde Fiction: An Anthology
A Duke University Press anthology of Chinese experimental fiction from the late 1980s, with stories by Su Tong, Yu Hua, Can Xue, Ma Yuan, and others translated by a small army of specialists. The book collects the generation that came of age after the Cultural Revolution and wrote as if realism had been used up. The contents range from hallucinatory Tibet to theatrical rewritings of history, and the apparatus is minimal: a short introduction, a list of contributors, and the texts. The Duke binding is the standard academic paperback, sturdy enough for a seminar and indifferent to shelf appeal. Ideal reader: the reader who thinks the most interesting Chinese fiction of the period is the kind that refuses to behave, or the student who needs an anthology that does most of its work on the page rather than in the footnotes.
