A patient escapes from an asylum to spend his life as the perfect mannequin in a department store display; when living alone is outlawed, a woman who resides quietly with her cat is assigned by bureaucrats to a role in an artificially created “family”; a luckless man transforms himself into a chair so people can, literally, sit on him. These are just a few of the inhabitants of Hon Lai-chu’s stories, where surreal charac-ters struggle to carve out space for freedom and individuality in an absurd world. The Chinese version of The Kite Family won the New Writer’s Novella first prize from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, was named one of 2008’s Books of the Year by Taiwan’s China Times, was selected as one of the Top 10 Chinese Novels Worldwide, and was awarded a Translation Grant from the US National Endowment for the Arts. “The Kite Family showcases the work of Hon Lai-chu, a wildly creative Hong Kong writer. The stories, elegantly translated by Andrea Lingenfelter, range from the torn-from-the-headlines dystopian anxieties of ‘Notes on an Epidemic’ to the more surrealistic ‘Forrest Woods, Chair,’ which takes themes from Kafka’s Metamorphosis in an engagingly novel direction. The book benefits greatly from an introduction by Lingenfelter, which both explains her approach to rendering Hon’s prose into English and shows how the author’s stories fit into Hong Kong’s fascinating and globally too-little-known literary landscape.” —Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know “Evocatively written and expertly translated, these Hong Kong stories will draw you into Hon Lai-chu’s surreal and yet recognizable world.” —Howard Goldblatt, translator of Nobel laureate Mo Yan

A targeted and insightful guide to the stages of writing fiction and memoir without falling into common traps, while wisely navigating the writing life, from an award-winning author and longtime teacher “A book-length master class.” —The Atlantic Writing well does not result from following rules and instructions, but from a blend of spontaneity, judgment, and a wise attitude toward the work—neither despairing nor defensive, but clear-eyed, courageous, and discerning. Writers must learn to tolerate the early stages, the dreamlike and irrational states of mind, and then to move from jottings and ideas to a messy first draft, and onward into the work of revision. Understanding these stages is key. The Kite and the String urges writers to let playfulness and spontaneity breathe life into the work—letting the kite move with the winds of feeling—while still holding on to the string that will keep it from flying away. Alice Mattison attends also to the difficulties of protecting writing time, preserving solitude, finding trusted readers, and setting the right goals for publication. The only writing guide that takes up both the stages of creative work and developing effective attitudes while progressing through them, plus strategies for learning more about the craft, The Kite and the String responds to a pressing need for writing guidance at all levels.

The Aristocratic Families in Tibetan HistoryThis book was written by an expert of Tibetan studies, introducing the life of Tibetan aristocratic families in old Tibet between 1900 and 1951. It is written in easy words with scores of precious historical photos, providing important data for the research into social systems in old Tibet.