Description
Book SynopsisThree classic novellas—
The King of Trees,
The King of Chess,
The King of Children—that completely altered the landscape of contemporary Chinese fiction.
Trade Review"Nearly all the Chinese critics who discuss Ah Cheng’s work go to great lengths to praise the spare, concentrated expressiveness of his prose style…. But they see in Ah Cheng’s powerful language an indicator of something else, too—they see in his style an extraordinary evocation of the Chinese national spirit, something that years of class struggle under Mao’s aegis had sought simply to efface." -- Theodore Huters - Modern China
"Beginning in 1984 with the publication of Ah Cheng’s novella
The King of Chess, the last half of the 1980s represented a major turning point in contemporary Chinese fiction. From that time on, contemporary Chinese fiction has been ‘walking toward the world’ (
zuoxiang shijie), a phrase that may be taken to mean approaching the quality of the finest in world fiction." -- Michael Duke - World Literature Today
