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    Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 15: Xuemo: Imagination and Spirituality: Chinese Literature and Culture, #15
    Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 15: Xuemo: Imagination and Spirituality: Chinese Literature and Culture, #15
    Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 15: Xuemo: Imagination and Spirituality: Chinese Literature and Culture, #15
    Ebook158 pages2 hours

    Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 15: Xuemo: Imagination and Spirituality: Chinese Literature and Culture, #15

    By Dongwei Chu

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    About this ebook

    We are very pleased to welcome Xuemo, another prize-winning author, into this new volume of Chinese Literature and Culture, which consists of excerpts of The Curse of Western Xia and excerpts of The Love Letters of Sharwardi in excellent English translation as well as two book reviews: Robert Tindol on the novel Desert Rites and Stephen Rake on the novel Desert Hunters.

    An author should have character and Xuemo is certainly the type we are looking for. Of all Chinese authors we have translated so far, Xuemo is unique in his spirituality and power of imagination.

    Unlike many writers who write in formulas that make predictable stories, Xuemo writes in a way that surprises the reader but meanwhile never loses the plot of a spiritual quest.

    In The Curse of Western Xia, five excerpts of which are published in the present volume, a robber father wants his son to be a robber while the Buddhist mother wants the son to be a monk, and as a result a series of strange stories take place. The novel also has another plot: a love story develops between a beautiful lady burglar and a Buddhist monk and is consummated in the religious practice of dual cultivation. In the words of Prof. Chen Xiaoming speaking to his students, "Xuemo gives a surreal experience by developing his literary narrative as a religious one which accesses and describes the world of evil as in a dream, a world as pale as the winter sun in the western deserts shining onto mud and soil, visible and weak, illusory and real at the same time."

    Xuemo is best known for his novels but he is equally accomplished at short stories. Chen Sihe, Professor of Chinese, Fudan University, in "What Is the Best Freeze Frame of Beauty?" (Shanghai Literature) notes: "Xuemo is particularly good at creating epic volumes. When I read Desert Rites and Hunters' Land, I feel as if I were actually transported to the vast, dry deserts…. On the other hand, his short stories are beautiful, animated and filled with sentiment..." He also notes, "While everything is dark and the reader wonders how the human evils and cruelties come into being and how humans have degenerated into beasts, Xuemo gives us a surprising miracle."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Leaves
    Release dateJun 19, 2019
    ISBN9781393770480
    Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 15: Xuemo: Imagination and Spirituality: Chinese Literature and Culture, #15
    Author

    Dongwei Chu

    Chinese Literature and Culture as a book series and peer-reviewed academic journal is edited by Dr. Chu Dongwei,  Fulbright Scholar, Professor of Translation Studies, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. Chu has published Lin Yutang as Author-Translator (2012), Translation as a Business (2003), Chinese translation of Will Durant’s On the Meaning of Life (2009), and English translation of The Platform Sutra and other Zen Buddhist texts in The Wisdom of Huineng (2015). He is the founder, editor and publisher of Chinese Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed journal of translations from the Chinese in collaboration with Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou Zilin Cultural Development Limited and IntLingo Inc., New York. He is also a contributor of short story translations to St. Petersburg Review, Renditions.

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      Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 15 - Dongwei Chu

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