Fiction. Translated from the French by Paul Knobloch. Originally published in 1947. "In the Exopotamian desert, where hepatrols blossom and children collect little animals called sandpeepers, the sun shines in an unusual way: it produces eerie black zones whose mysteries remain unexplained. Above all, Vian's pecurilar way with language proves that, indeed, life in the desert is equal to none. Since unusual language is bound to produce unusual fiction, it follows that the story does not take place in the fall, nor is it set in China" - from the Foreword by Marc Lapprand. The fourth novel by Vian, who was a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir. His innovative style, cutting-edge during his lifetime, but only successful in the sixties, made him an icon of the May 1968 student movement.

Fiction. "In the tradition of Karl May and Franz Kafka, Boris Vian imagines an American even more amazing that the land he has never visited. "I Spit on Your Graves" is the first novel to put the quotation marks around the "hardboiled" thriller -- a vivid and startling performance" (J. Hoberman). The book is Boris Vian's (1920-1959) sex-and-violence-filled homage to American noir. Originally published in France as J'rai Cracher Sur Vos Tombes -- after allegedly being censored in the U.S. and "translated" into French -- the novel was no best seller, establishing Vian as one of the most famous writers of the mid-twentieth century.

In 1975 I went to Peking for a year, together with nine other British students who had been exchanged by the British Council for ten Chinese students. The latter knew exactly what they were doing: learning English in order to further the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. We were less sure. From 1966, China had been turned upside down by young Red Guards who were encouraged to Bombard the Headquarters'. Professors, surgeons, artists, pianists, novelists and film directors were attacked for their bourgeois pursuit of excellence or their attachment to decadent Western ideas. Though by 1975 there were no longer violent street battles or badly beaten bodies floating down the Pearl River, we found Peking University governed by a Revolutionary Committee of workers, peasants and Party members determined that we should not learn too much and become experts divorced from the masses. With our Chinese classmates, we spent half our time in factories, getting in the way of workers making railway engines, or in the fields, learning from peasants how to bundle cabbage or plant rice seedlings in muddy water. Heroically, we stayed up half the night to dig rather shallow underground shelter

Boris Vian s early death robbed French literature of a novelist who was coherent while still modern. Heartsnatcher is an esoteric, surrealistic comedy about guilt, set in a deceptively familiar, almost ordinary locale. New Statesman

Poetry. East Asia Studies. Translated from the Chinese by Dan Murphy. In the six years prior to his death, Hai Zi wrote over 250 short poems, a number of poetic plays, long poems totaling over 400 pages, and several short stories. His verse illuminates the poverty and desperation of his peasant upbringing, reflects on China's literary and cultural history, and touches down on the grasslands and wheat fields of western China, but he is not simply a cultural poet or a nature poet—his poetry transcends all of this. In OVER AUTUMN ROOFTOPS, Host Publications is proud to make available to English-speaking audiences the work of this profound and beloved poet.

"A long-awaited memoir by the celebrated physicist whose clashes with the Chinese regime helped inspired the Tiananmen Square protests describes how in spite of his scientific contributions he was sentenced to hard labor for decades and eventually sought asylum from the U.S., "--NoveList.