Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons

Book excerpt: Ten Thousand Miles of Clouds and Moons gathers sixteen phenomenal writers of the Chinese language in their English debut: eight fiction writers, six poets, and two essayists. Amongst these dazzling tellings, the planets are being pulled closer to the earth; a treasured classical fiction holds the secrets of the universe; shameful acts of urban ennui are committed over- and underground; a couple navigates the phantasmagoric border between life and death; the classrooms of the eighties and nineties are fleetingly free. Ranging from cityscapes to mountain ranges, ancestral lands to parallel worlds, these authors exhibit a panoramic vista of contemporary Chinese-language writing at its most imaginative and incisive, balancing intellectual power with lyrical enchantment to lend insight into a nation oscillating between tradition and modernity, apocalyptic visions and pedestrian loves, provocation and nostalgia, reality and dreamscapes.