A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China. Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.

A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China. Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.

Twenty years after their college graduation, four Radcliffe girls return to their Harvard class reunion with mixed emotions and curiosity. It is the first time they have met since their hopeful student years, when each of them had wonderful dreams of becoming wives, mothers, and successful career women. But much has changed since the fifties, and the former classmates’ lives have been altered by events none of them could have foreseen. Humorous, heartwarming, often poignant and nostalgic, Class Reunion captures the spirit of the fifties brilliantly in contrast to the changing world the four girls have embraced, often with straightforward and pithy commentary on the social conventions of the past.

What is a detail? How is it different from xijie, its Chinese counterpart? Is "reading for the details" fundamentally different from "reading for the plot"? Did xijie xiaoshuo, the Chinese novel of details, give the world its earliest form of modern fiction? Inspired by studies of vision and modernity as well as cinema, this book gazes out on the larger world through the small aperture of the detail, highlighting how concrete literary minutiae become "telling" as they reveal the dynamics of seeing and hearing, the vibrations of the mind, the complexity of the everyday, and the imperative to recognize the minute, the humble, and the hidden. In a strain of masterpieces of xijie xiaoshuo, such details play a key role in pivoting the novel from didacticism towards a capacious modern form. Examining the Chinese detail as both a common idiom and a unique concept, and extrapolating it from individual works to the culture at large, reveals under-explored areas of the Chinese novel: its psychological depths, its connections with other genres and forms, its partaking in Chinese material life and capitalist modernity, as well as repressions and difficulties surrounding its reception in national and international contexts. With carefully chosen case studies, Xiao’s book not only exemplifies the value of deep reading in approaching complex works of Chinese fiction as world literature, it also throws light on the aesthetics and politics of "the unseen," which has become central to a humanist tradition that flows across literature, cinema, and other art forms.

Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China. A New York Review Books Original “[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times "With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." –Ang Lee Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

Spunky and outgoing, nothing much bothers medical examiner Serena Hopkins--except for the thought of falling in love again. But when a serial killer is picking off her former classmates, Serena's life becomes intertwined with her old high school crush, FBI agent Dominic Allen. Is the secret she's keeping putting her next on the killer's hit list? Can she trust Dominic with the truth before it's too late? Intense, emotional, and fast-paced, When a Heart Stops will have readers up late as they race to the finish to find out what happens.

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) is arguably the most perceptive writer in modern Chinese literature. She was one of the most popular writers in 1940s Shanghai, but her insistence on writing about individual human relationships and mundane matters rather than revolutionary and political movements meant that in mainland China, she was neglected until very recently. Outside the mainland, her life and writings never ceased to fascinate Chinese readers. There are hundreds of works about her in the Chinese language but very few in other languages. This is the first work in English to explore her earliest short stories as well as novels that were published posthumously. It discusses the translation of her stories for film and stage presentation, as well as nonliterary aspects of her life that are essential for a more comprehensive understanding of her writings, including her intense concern for privacy and enduring sensitivity to her public image. The thirteen essays examine the fidelity and betrayals that dominate her alter ego's relationships with parents and lovers, informed by theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines including literary, historical, gender, and film studies. These relationships are frequently dramatized in plays and filmic translations of her work.