Search results for ""Author Austin Woerner""
Small Beer Press The Invisible Valley: a novel
Lu Beiping is one of 20 million young adults the Chinese government uproots and sends far from their homes for agricultural re-education. And Lu is bored and exhausted. While he pines for romance, instead he’s caught up in a forbidden religious tradition and married off to the foreman’s long-dead daughter so that her soul may rest. The foreman then sends him off to cattle duty up on Mudkettle Mountain, far away from everyone else. On the mountain, Lu meets an outcast polyamorous family led by a matriarch, Jade, and one of her lovers, Kingfisher. They are woodcutters and practice their own idiosyncratic faith by which they claim to placate the serpent-demon sleeping in the belly of the mountains. Just as the village authorities get wind of Lu’s dalliances with the woodcutters, a typhoon rips through the valley. And deep in the jungle, a giant serpent may be stirring. The Invisible Valley is a lyrical fable about the shapes into which human affection can be pressed in extreme circumstances; about what is natural and what is truly deviant; about the relationships between the human and the natural, the human and the divine, the self and the other.
£13.73
Zephyr Press Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe
Ouyang Jianghe belongs to the "third generation" of twentieth-century Chinese literature and the so-called "five masters from Sichuan"poets who consciously distance themselves from the "Misty" (obscure) poets such as Bei Dao and Yang Lian. His writing advocates an intellectual model that is based on reflection and the expression of mature recognition rather than inspiration, sudden impulse, or spontaneous illumination, and is concerned with everyday themes, the insignificant, and the private. From "Handgun": you can take a- part a handgun, break it in two, into a hand a gun paint the hand black, you've got a faction put the gun on a boat: that's a means of persuasion you can take apart a faction into further partitions parties ambitions you can break it into act, or action the world divides in infinite fissions one eye you aim at love; the other you ram into the barrel of a gun the bullets ogle you level your nose at your enemies' Critics consider Ouyang Jianghe's poetry some of the most challenging avant-garde verse written in China over the past few decades. His poems, which have the intricate, sculpted quality of fugues, are concerned with dissecting the layers of meaning that underlie everyday objects and notions like "doubled shadows." He is a prominent art critic and chief editor of the literary magazine Jintian; he lives in Beijing. Austin Woerner graduated from Yale University in East Asian studies. In September 2009 he took part in a joint residency with Ouyang Jianghe at the Vermont Studio Center, where they were the first writer-translator pair in the literature in translation program. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
£12.31
Zephyr Press Phoenix
Phoenix is a bilingual edition of a poem commissioned by Xu Bing's studio to accompany his installationPhoenix. Xu Bing spent two years creating this work, which features two monumental birds fabricated entirely from materials harvested from construction sites in urban China, including demolition debris, steel beams, tools, and remnants of daily lives. The Phoenix will move to New York City after its current run at MASS MoCA. This edition includes over two dozen color photographs of the Phoenix interspersed between the long poem. Ouyang Jianghe is one of mainland China's most established poets. Zephyr published his first book in English translation, Doubled Shadows.
£12.20
