Word: novels
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...story is semiautobiographical. Guo grew up in a small village on an island off south China's coast, and went to Beijing at around the same age as her character Fenfang. She churned out novels to support herself while in film school. In 2002, she left Beijing for London, where she continued her film studies and began writing A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a humorous novel about her struggles with the English language and a British paramour. An expired visa forced her to return to Beijing, where she put the novel on hold and made Concrete Revolution...
...gave him my ID number, my Young Pioneers Cinema number, my mobile phone number, my home number and my next-door neighbor's phone number." Guo's tender portrayal of one of youth's abiding contradictions - its simultaneous scorn and passionate appetite for the world - is one of the novel's pleasures. Apart from Fenfang's genuine love of food, this is what the ravenousness of the title is about...
...does get work as an extra in a series of movies and TV shows, but the bit parts lead nowhere, so she begins to write screenplays of her own. One of them, nestled like a matryoshka doll into the novel itself, is about an ignorant but good-hearted rural immigrant to Beijing who works as a street vendor. The structure of the novel itself resembles a screenplay, told in highly visual prose broken into a series of short chapters. The Beijing Olympics brought viewers images of the city's monumental new architecture. But Guo gives us the insider vantage...
...This is a short, spry, slangy novel, but it speaks about the conundrums of identity and individuality with gestures that remain long in the mind. The germ for the story emerged from Guo's first book, published in China when she was just 19. Guo reworked that in English, with the aid of a translation by Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey. Now she has written in English again. Chinese critics may moan, as they have over Ha Jin, about linguistic "betrayal." Let them. Literature is about a place beyond the provincial, and wherever writers like...
Gray wove his early struggles into Lanark, the autobiographical novel that finally put him on literature's world map in 1981. His novels and stories since then, as well as the murals he barters for lunches, or the exquisite illustrations and typography of the Book of Prefaces he spent more than a decade fussing over, have rarely reverberated beyond Glasgow or his faithful readers. Glass portrays an artist too engrossed in his own creativity to notice. Gray, a jack of all trades, is master of one: himself...