Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth PDF Author: Xiaolu Guo
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0307389383
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
The latest novel from Orange Prize finalist Xiaolu Guo is the enchantingly comic story of a young Chinese woman's life as a film extra in hyper-modern, tumultuous Beijing.Though twenty-one-year-old Fenfang Wang has traveled 1,800 miles to seek her fortune in urban Beijing, she is ill-prepared for what greets her: a Communist regime that has outworn its welcome, a city in slap-dash development, and a sexist attitude more in keeping with her peasant upbringing than the country's progressive capital. But after mastering the fever and tumult of the city, Fenfang ultimately finds her true independence in the one place she never expected.

I Am China

I Am China PDF Author: Xiaolu Guo
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099583739
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Get Book Here

Book Description
Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Fiction Prize In a flat above a noisy north London market, translator Iona Kirkpatrick starts work on a Chinese letter. Two lovers, Mu and Jian, have been driven apart by forces beyond their control. As Iona unravels the story of the lovers, Jian and Mu seem to be travelling further and further away from each other. Iona, intoxicated by their romance, sets out to bring them back together, but time is running out. Xiaolu Guo was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists

Nine Continents

Nine Continents PDF Author: Xiaolu Guo
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802189326
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 365

Get Book Here

Book Description
The acclaimed novelist’s award-winning memoir of growing up in a remote Chinese fishing village is “a rich and insightful coming-of-age story” (Kirkus). The acclaimed author of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers and I Am China, Xiaolu Guo grew up an unwanted child in a poor fishing village on the East China Sea. But a Taoist monk made a startling prediction to her grandmother: that Guo would prove herself to be a peasant warrior and grow up to travel the nine continents. In Nine Continents, Guo tells the story of a curious mind coming of age in an inhospitable country, and her determination to seek a life beyond the limits of its borders. From her family’s village to a rapidly changing Beijing, to a life beyond China, Nine Continents presents a fascinating portrait of how the Cultural Revolution shaped families, and how the country’s economic ambitions have given rise to great change. This “moving and often exhilarating” memoir confirms Xiaolu Guo as one of world literature’s most urgent voices (Financial Times, UK).

The Falafel King is Dead

The Falafel King is Dead PDF Author: Sara Shilo
Publisher: Granta
ISBN: 9781846272219
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
A heartbreaking, prize-winning novel set in a small Israeli town near the border with Lebanon that depicts with raw power the trauma of living in constant fear of attack.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers PDF Author: Xiaolu Guo
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307455637
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
From one of our most important contemporary Chinese authors: a novel of language and love that tells one young Chinese woman's story of her journey to the West—and her attempts to understand the language, and the man, she adores. Zhuang—or “Z,” to tongue-tied foreigners—has come to London to study English, but finds herself adrift, trapped in a cycle of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps. Then she meets an Englishman who changes everything, leading her into a world of self-discovery. She soon realizes that, in the West, “love” does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover. And as the novel progresses with steadily improving grammar and vocabulary, Z's evolving voice makes her quest for comprehension all the more poignant. With sparkling wit, Xiaolu Guo has created an utterly original novel about identity and the cultural divide.

Shanghai Baby

Shanghai Baby PDF Author: Wei Hui
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743424158
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
The gap that divides those of us born in the 1970s and the older generation has never been so wide. Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China. The risque contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting, this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it depicts the new generation rising in the East. Set in the centuries-old port city of Shanghai, the novel follows the days, and nights, of the irrepressibly carnal Coco, who waits tables in a café when she meets her first lover, a sensitive Chinese artist. Defying her parents, Coco moves in with her boyfriend and enters a frenzied, orgasmic world of drugs and hedonism. But, helpless to stop her gentle lover's descent into addiction, Coco becomes attracted to a boisterous Westerner, a rich German businessman with a penchant for S/M and seduction. Now, with an entourage of friends ranging from a streetwise madame to a rebellious filmmaker, Coco's forays into in the territory of love and lust cross the borders between two cultures -- awakening her guilt and fears of discovery, yet stimulating her emerging sexual self. Searing a blistering image into the reader's imagination, Shanghai Baby provides an alternative travelogue into the back streets of a city and the hard-core escapades of today's liberated youth. Wei Hui's provocative portrayal of men, women, and cultural transition is an astonishing and brave exposure of the unacknowledged new China, breaking through official rhetoric to show the inroads of the West and a people determined to burst free.

The Cheffe

The Cheffe PDF Author: Marie NDiaye
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525520481
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the celebrated French writer Marie NDiaye--Prix Goncourt-winning author of Three Strong Women--comes the story of the Cheffe: a woman who lives in the single-minded pursuit of creating incomparable culinary delights. Born into poverty in southwestern France, as a teenager the Cheffe takes a job working for a wealthy couple in a neighboring town. It is not long before it becomes clear that she has an unusual, remarkable talent for cooking, and soon her sheer talent and ambition put her in charge of the couple’s kitchen. Though she revels in the culinary spotlight, the Cheffe remains secretive about the rest of her life. She shares nothing of her feelings or emotions. She becomes pregnant but will not reveal her daughter’s father. And when the demands of her work become too great, she leaves her baby in the care of her family and sets out to open her own restaurant, to rave reviews. As time goes on, the Cheffe’s relationship with her daughter remains fraught, and eventually it threatens to destroy everything the Cheffe has spent her life perfecting. Told from the perspective of the Cheffe’s former assistant and unrequited lover, this stunning novel by Marie NDiaye is a gustatory tour de force.

A Lover's Discourse

A Lover's Discourse PDF Author: Xiaolu Guo
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1473574897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
'A fragmentary meditation on the nature of love' Guardian A Chinese woman comes to post-Brexit London to start over - just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch. Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build their future together. Playing with language and the cultural differences that our narrator encounters as she settles into her new life, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.

Once Upon A Time in the East

Once Upon A Time in the East PDF Author: Xiaolu Guo
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 147352430X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award* *Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award* *Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize* *Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2018* *A Sunday Times Book of the Year* Xiaolu Guo meets her parents for the first time when she is almost seven. They are strangers to her. When she is born in 1973, her parents hand her over to a childless peasant couple in the mountains. Aged two, and suffering from malnutrition on a diet of yam leaves, they leave Xiaolu with her illiterate grandparents in a fishing village on the East China Sea. Once Upon a Time in the East takes Xiaolu from a run-down shack to film school in a rapidly changing Beijing, navigating the everyday peculiarity of modern China: censorship, underground art, Western boyfriends. In 2002 she leaves Beijing on a scholarship to study in Britain. Now, after a decade in Europe, her tale of East to West resonates with the insight that can only come from someone who is both an outsider and at home. 'This generation's Wild Swans' Daily Telegraph

Beauty on Earth

Beauty on Earth PDF Author: Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
Publisher: Onesuch Press
ISBN: 0987276077
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through the door of a Swiss inn the reader steps into a painting. Two men talk to each other and before long the writer -someone like them, one of them- begins to address us. Thus commences the fugue that is Beauty on Earth,in which the coming of a beautiful orphan to her uncle's inn brings a gradual chaos upon his town. Swiss novelist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz published La Beauté in 1927. This translation by Michelle Bailat-Jones is a gift for which English language readers have waited decades.

Lovers in the Age of Indifference

Lovers in the Age of Indifference PDF Author: Xiaolu Guo
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409089193
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Get Book Here

Book Description
Discover love and desire from around the globe A marriage splinters during a game of mah jong A depressed fiancée is lifted by a mid-air encounter with a Hollywood legend A mountain keeper watches over a lonely temple but is perturbed when, finally, a visitor dares to arrive. The lovers you'll encounter in Lovers in the Age of Indifference may come from across the world, but they all share a tough, romantic spirit. Written in a warm, witty prose, writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo's engagingly maverick collection of stories zooms in on moments in the lives of lost souls and lovers in a tender and surreal fashion. Enchantingly moving between West and East, Guo's personal, provocative and charming fables capture the sense of alienation thrown up by life in the modern world. Follow her characters in their search for human contact - and love - in rapidly-changing landscapes all around the globe 'Xiaolu Guo is an instinctive witness; her atmospheric, unusually physical narratives are alive' Irish Times