A bounty of new Chinese writing in Ten Thousand Miles Of Clouds And Moons

Ten Thousand Miles Of Clouds And Moons: New Chinese Writing

- Shawn Hoo

TEN THOUSAND MILES OF CLOUDS AND MOONS: NEW CHINESE WRITING Edited by Zuo Fei, Xiao Yue Shan and Simon Shieh Literary anthology/Honford Star/Paperback/ 204 pages/$27 ★★★★★

Hundreds and thousands of books are published in China every year, but only a tiny sliver make it into English. Moreover, many of the writers who get translated are literary heavyweights — science-fiction writer Liu Cixin, novelist Yan Lianke and Nobel laureate Mo Yan, for example.

A recently published anthology of Chinese writing is a breath of fresh air as it introduces, in one fell swoop, 16 Chinese-language writers who have not been published in English. Ten Thousand Miles Of Clouds And Moons is compiled by the editors of Beijing-based arts periodical Spittoon Literary Magazine and offers a bountiful and varied landscape of writing that runs the gamut from meta-fiction to memoir.

Among the younger writers collected in the anthology, there is a fascination with ancient texts and period pieces — written in a meta-fictional style that suggests a certain irreverence and playfulness with inherited historical materials.