Introducing a brilliant new literary voice with a tender love story set against the backdrop of modern China

An international literary phenomenon -- now available for the first time in English translation -- Candy is a hip, harrowing tale of risk and desire, the story of a young Chinese woman forging a life for herself in a world seemingly devoid of guidelines. Hong, who narrates the novel, and whose life in many ways parallels the author's own, drops out of high school and runs away at age 17 to the frontier city of Shenzen. As Hong navigates the temptations of the city, she quickly falls in love with a young musician and together they dive into a cruel netherworld of alcohol, drugs, and excess, a life that fails to satisfy Hong's craving for an authentic self, and for a love that will define her. This startling and subversive novel is a blast of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll that opens up to us a modern China we've never seen before. Banned in China -- with Mian Mian labeled the 'poster child for spiritual pollution' -- Candy still managed to sell 60,000 copies, as well as countless additional copies in pirated editions. Candy has been published in eight countries to date and has become a bestseller in France.

This study examines economic, social, political, and cultural changes as funneled through the teahouses of Chengdu during the first half of the twentieth century.

Creative Writing is a complete writing course that will jump-start your writing and guide you through your first steps towards publication. Suitable for use by students, tutors, writers’ groups or writers working alone, this book offers: a practical and inspiring section on the creative process, showing you how to stimulate your creativity and use your memory and experience in inventive ways in-depth coverage of the most popular forms of writing, in extended sections on fiction, poetry and life writing, including biography and autobiography, giving you practice in all three forms so that you might discover and develop your particular strengths a sensible, up-to-date guide to going public, to help you to edit your work to a professional standard and to identify and approach suitable publishers a distinctive collection of exciting exercises, spread throughout the workbook to spark your imagination and increase your technical flexibility and control a substantial array of illuminating readings, bringing together extracts from contemporary and classic writings in order to demonstrate a range of techniques that you can use or adapt in your own work. Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings presents a unique opportunity to benefit from the advice and experience of a team of published authors who have also taught successful writing courses at a wide range of institutions, helping large numbers of new writers to develop their talents as well as their abilities to evaluate and polish their work to professional standards. These institutions include Lancaster University and the University of East Anglia, renowned as consistent producers of published writers.

Based loosely on the life of the author's grandfather, a professional embroiderer in the court of the last king of Vietnam in the early 1900s, Kien Nguyen has reimagined his grandfather's amazing story to weave a tapestry of his own: this stunning and page-turning novel. Dan Nguyen is seven years old when he witnesses his father brutally beheaded by the mayor in a bid for power. Dan's wife, Ven, 20 years his senior, makes him promise to one day avenge his father's death. In order to protect him until he is old enough to defend his family's honor, Ven hides Dan as a servant in the house of the enemy -- and Dan falls in love with the one person he can never have, the mayor's beautiful granddaughter Tai May. Dan's journey from slavery into scandal, and finally to the royal court where he has the chance to win Tai May's heart, is a story of spellbinding drama and intrigue, and, ultimately, the story of a great love affair.

An unusual book of quirky essays, some deeply personal. Xu Xi writes from within, of Hong Kong's vanishing culture and sensibility as it transforms itself into a space that is 21st Century China. She zooms in on her own life in the city: on family, friends and a professional history as both business executive and author, on moments that offer wry observations of the shifting world around her. She casts her eye on films, pop stars, public transportation, and muses on the political, without losing sight of the distinctly apolitical culture that evolved through a history as the former British colony and Chinese "Special Administrative Region" after the 1997 "handover."