Search results for ""author mu xin""

A painter and writer, Mu Xin (1927–2011) received his artistic education in cosmopolitan Shanghai. During the Chinese Civil War, he fled to Taiwan; at the war’s conclusion, he returned to the mainland. Having survived persecution at home, for two decades he lived in New York, and resettled in his hometown, Wuzhen, at the end of his life. In old age, a reclusive Mu Xin enjoyed literary renown in the Sinophone sphere. Of his oeuvre, he was most content with his poetry. Toward Bravery, selected and translated by Mingyuan Hu, is the first collection of Mu Xin’s poetry to appear in English. Published in 2017, it is reissued in 2022 in a bilingual format.

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An Empty Room is the first book by the celebrated Chinese writer Mu Xin to appear in English. A cycle of thirteen tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, this collection is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingway’s In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin’s wandering “I” interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An Empty Room is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss, and humanity regained.

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