Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant PDF Author: Yu Hua
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307425266
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Brothers and China in Ten Words: here is Yu Hua’s unflinching portrait of life under Chairman Mao. A cart-pusher in a silk mill, Xu Sanguan augments his meager salary with regular visits to the local blood chief. His visits become lethally frequent as he struggles to provide for his wife and three sons at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Shattered to discover that his favorite son was actually born of a liaison between his wife and a neighbor, he suffers his greatest indignity, while his wife is publicly scorned as a prostitute. Although the poverty and betrayals of Mao’s regime have drained him, Xu Sanguan ultimately finds strength in the blood ties of his family. With rare emotional intensity, grippingly raw descriptions of place and time, and clear-eyed compassion, Yu Hua gives us a stunning tapestry of human life in the grave particulars of one man’s days.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant PDF Author: Yu Hua
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1400031850
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Brothers and China in Ten Words: here is Yu Hua’s unflinching portrait of life under Chairman Mao. A cart-pusher in a silk mill, Xu Sanguan augments his meager salary with regular visits to the local blood chief. His visits become lethally frequent as he struggles to provide for his wife and three sons at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Shattered to discover that his favorite son was actually born of a liaison between his wife and a neighbor, he suffers his greatest indignity, while his wife is publicly scorned as a prostitute. Although the poverty and betrayals of Mao’s regime have drained him, Xu Sanguan ultimately finds strength in the blood ties of his family. With rare emotional intensity, grippingly raw descriptions of place and time, and clear-eyed compassion, Yu Hua gives us a stunning tapestry of human life in the grave particulars of one man’s days.

China in Ten Words

China in Ten Words PDF Author: Yu Hua
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307739791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
From one of China’s most acclaimed writers: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades. Framed by ten phrases common in the Chinese vernacular, China in Ten Words uses personal stories and astute analysis to reveal as never before the world’s most populous yet oft-misunderstood nation. In "Disparity," for example, Yu Hua illustrates the expanding gaps that separate citizens of the country. In "Copycat," he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in "Bamboozle," he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society. Witty, insightful, and courageous, this is a refreshingly candid vision of the "Chinese miracle" and all of its consequences.

Cries in the Drizzle

Cries in the Drizzle PDF Author: Yu Hua
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307483401
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Yu Hua’s beautiful, heartbreaking novel Cries in the Drizzle follows a young Chinese boy throughout his childhood and adolescence during the reign of Chairman Mao. The middle son of three, Sun Guanglin is constantly neglected ignored by his parents and his younger and older brother. Sent away at age six to live with another family, he returns to his parents’ house six years later on the same night that their home burns to the ground, making him even more a black sheep. Yet Sun Guanglin’s status as an outcast, both at home and in his village, places him in a unique position to observe the changing nature of Chinese society, as social dynamics — and his very own family — are changed forever under Communist rule. With its moving, thoughtful prose, Cries in the Drizzle is a stunning addition to the wide-ranging work of one of China’s most distinguished contemporary writers.

To Live

To Live PDF Author: Yu Hua
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307429792
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Originally banned in China but later named one of that nation’s most influential books, a searing novel that portrays one man’s transformation from the spoiled son of a landlord to a kindhearted peasant. “A work of astounding emotional power.” —Dai Sijie, author of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress From the author of Brothers and China in Ten Words: this celebrated contemporary classic of Chinese literature was also adapted for film by Zhang Yimou. After squandering his family’s fortune in gambling dens and brothels, the young, deeply penitent Fugui settles down to do the honest work of a farmer. Forced by the Nationalist Army to leave behind his family, he witnesses the horrors and privations of the Civil War, only to return years later to face a string of hardships brought on by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. Left with an ox as the companion of his final years, Fugui stands as a model of gritty authenticity, buoyed by his appreciation for life in this narrative of humbling power.

The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata PDF Author: R. K. Narayan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022605747X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
“Narayan makes this treasury of Indian folklore and mythology readily accessible to the general reader . . . he captures the spirit of the narrative.”—Library Journal The Mahabharata tells a story of such violence and tragedy that many people in India refuse to keep the full text in their homes, fearing that doing so would invite a disastrous fate upon their house. Covering everything from creation to destruction, this ancient poem remains an indelible part of Hindu culture and a landmark in ancient literature. Centuries of listeners and readers have been drawn to The Mahabharata, which began as disparate oral ballads and grew into a sprawling epic. The modern version is famously long, and at more than 1.8 million words—seven times the combined lengths of the Iliad and Odyssey—it can be incredibly daunting. But contemporary readers have a much more accessible entry point to this important work, thanks to R. K. Narayan’s masterful, elegant translation and abridgement of the poem. Now with a new foreword by Wendy Doniger, as well as a concise character and place guide and a family tree, The Mahabharata is ready for a new generation of readers. Narayan ably distills a tale that is both traditional and constantly changing. He draws from both scholarly analysis and creative interpretation and vividly fuses the spiritual with the secular. Through this balance he has produced a translation that is not only clear, but graceful, one that stands as its own story as much as an adaptation of a larger work.

The Networked Citizen

The Networked Citizen PDF Author: Giovanni Navarria
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811332932
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
This book investigates the changing meanings of power and politics in the Internet age and questions whether the political category of the citizen still has a meaningful role to play in the highly-mediated dynamics of an increasingly networked world. To answer such questions, the book analyses and compares the impact of the Internet on the relationship between state, citizens, and politics in three countries: the USA, Italy, and China. The book’s journey starts in the mid-90s and ends in 2016. It pays particular attention to Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, the ascendance to power in Italy of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, and to the enduring Chinese government’s struggle to control the Internet public opinion. The book challenges the traditional understanding of power through which the strong typically prevails over the weak. This leads to a clearer understanding of the wider role citizens can play (and must play) in a networked political sphere, while it also warns the reader on the many risks citizens face in a post-truth world. The book challenges the traditional understanding of power through which the strong typically prevails over the weak. This leads to a clearer understanding of the wider role citizens can play (and must play) in a networked political sphere.

Dream of Ding Village

Dream of Ding Village PDF Author: Yan Lianke
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802195962
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
“A brilliant and harrowing novel” about a deadly epidemic fueled by corruption, based on real-life events in China (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, Dream of Ding Village is based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China. The novel is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan Lianke, who worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. Whole villages were wiped out with no responsibility taken or reparations paid. Dream of Ding Village focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the party pile as he exploits the situation, while another son is infected and dies. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing and what happens to those who get in the way. “Lianke confronts the black market blood trade and the subsequent AIDS epidemic it sparked, in a brilliant and harrowing novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Past and the Punishments

The Past and the Punishments PDF Author: Hua Yu
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824863895
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
To travel through these stories is to cross a landscape of stunning beauty and terrific cruelty, where expectations are subverted, where moral certainties are shattered, where gorgeously wrought surfaces beguile at the same time that acts of incredible brutality horrify. It is no wonder that Yu Hua’s stories caused a sensation when they first appeared in the 1980s. His work represents a sophisticated and often disturbing revolution in the Chinese literary tradition, reminiscent of the fiction of modernists like Kafka, Kawabata, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet, but drawing inspiration from several strains of traditional Chinese narrative as well. This is the first collection of short fiction by Yu Hua to appear in English. It takes us on a haunting and harrowing journey from classical China through the Cultural Revolution and into the new era of economic reform, exploding along the way our preconceived notions of what Chinese literature and culture are all about in the 1990s.

Merchant Kings

Merchant Kings PDF Author: Stephen R. Bown
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429927356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records. Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.