Asia Book Club of NYC - April Meetup

For the inaugural meeting of the Asia Book Club of NYC, the selection is Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury

I apologize for the fact that the meeting date is coming up quite soon - in three weeks actually - but I'm leaving on a business trip a few days afterward (to China actually!) and won't be back until the end of the month. I'm assuming the book is a pretty fast - and enjoyable - read.

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. - New York Review of Books