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Top 10 Chinese and foreign fiction books in January 2022
"Searchlight Good Book" is hosted by Tencent Group + Reading Group, co-organized by QQ Reading, WeChat Reading, Tencent News, and undertaken by Searchlight Book Critics Association. According to the vote of 21 readers, 10 Chinese and foreign novels, 10 Chinese and foreign genre novels, and 15 Chinese and foreign humanities and social science books are evaluated every month. According to the reader's vote, the popular top 3 books in the 3 lists per month are rated.
We pay tribute to those good works that have "the beauty of literature, the truth of thought, the weight of history, attention to the present, elegant narrative, and beautiful expression", creativity, imagination, and exploration.
The following are the top ten Chinese and foreign novels in January 2022, in no particular order.
Thanks to the authors, translators, editors-in-charge, and producers and publishers of these works.
Translate | novelette
The Observer
By Italo Calvino
Translated by Bi Yanhong
Yilin Publishing House
January 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Zhou Limin (Scholar, Executive Deputy Director of Ba Jin's Former Residence)
"The Observer" writes about the "Day of the Scrutineer" at the polling station during the election, and sees through his eyes and position what the party did in the election: in order to solicit votes, disabled people, all kinds of patients were "driven" to the stage by them, shouting and laughing with all kinds of solemn and funny performances...
Calvino "observed" the central problems of democracy and procedure, and not only that, but he also thought about the nature of man and existence. He himself said: "The subjects I deal with in The Observer, namely, the innate misfortune and suffering, the responsibility for procreation, are things that I never dared to touch before. Now I can't say exactly touched on it, but I've acknowledged their existence and know that to consider these things, it can change a lot of things. He added: "I spent ten years, longer than any of my previous works." (See the preface of the book)
In fact, the Chinese translation is only more than eighty pages long, which once again allows us to see the conciseness of Calvino's narrative and the length of thinking, and how the writer's personal style and sense of reality are balanced. Calvino is clearly not the kind of writer who indulges in the "self" and closes his eyes to reality, but he has never lost his personal style for the sake of "reality", which is another literary lesson that requires patient understanding for those who only regard him as a master of technique or style to learn.
Chinese original | A collection of short stories
"Concert"
Ai Wei
People's Literature Publishing House
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Xu Chenliang (Executive Editor of Contemporary Magazine)
The novel collection "Concert" uses seven elaborate works with dagger-like blades and diamond-like edges to show us the depth and breadth of the short story genre in the hands of contemporary Chinese writers. As a novelist who has a dazzling record on different tracks such as long-distance running, sprinting and even cross-country running, Ai Wei has a unique understanding of the creation ability of fictional works. In this short story collection, he lets the reader climb the Ferris wheel with the protagonist to watch the concert, peek into the interior of a hugely rich family with the eyes of a surrogate mother, use a drama to probe the secret heart of a female murderer, one by one, irrational, like a surprise attack, through the "accident" to break the daily ice.
As Ai Wei said, standing opposite the solid and uniform behemoth, questioning it, shaking it, piercing it, so as to return the possibility to life and freedom to the characters, is the internal logic of the novel. The infinite potential of the short story in this regard, which is not proportional to its length, deserves more attention.
Chinese original | Novel
The Road to Fatherhood
Ye Zhaoyan
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Wang Chunlin (Professor of Shanxi University, Editor-in-Chief of Novel Review)
Born in a cultural family, Ye Zhaoyan, whose three generations of grandchildren are well-known writers, can be said that his left hand is a novel, his right hand is prose, and he is good at both novels and prose, and has made extraordinary outstanding achievements in the creation of both genres.
Perhaps related to Ye Zhaoyan's overly penetrating and profound understanding of the lives of contemporary Chinese intellectuals, the entire "Road to the Father", although it is only 40,000 words in terms of length, the writer very cleverly intercepts several key life nodes, from the birth of the protagonist Zhang Zuo at the beginning of the novel, all the way to the end of the age, more than half a century of life experience is highly condensed into an extremely limited text, which is really a weight.
Being able to continue Ye Zhaoyan's consistent plain and objective narrative style, and to think deeply about a series of grand propositions such as family and era, the closeness or alienation of the relationship between father and son, and the change of the spiritual fate of intellectuals with a word count of 40,000 words without hesitation, Ye Zhaoyan's artistic ability is indeed impressive.
Tide Chart
Lin Zhuo sighed
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Searchlight Good Book Judge | He Ping (Professor, Nanjing Normal University)
"Tidal Chart" was published in harvest no. 5, 2021, and is Lin Zhao's second novel after "Flowing Stream". As soon as "Tidal Chart" was published, it attracted the attention of the mass media and literary circles, and entered the annual list of major literature, becoming the only youth literature event in 2021.
"Tidal Chart", the Cantonese dialect of Huanrui self-generated, the narrative cavity of the female giant frog is gentle and changeable, with a broad and elegant picture of the world imagination and the writing of a natural history, etc., from different directions and paths to expand the boundaries of the novel. In the literary style of young people's writing that generally perceives, explores and defines boundaries with personal emotions, "Tide Map" introduces major cultural issues into literature, which can be used as a practical sample of self-expectation for young writers to consciously emphasize their thinking ability.
For this reason, it can be understood that the time set by the novel "Tide Map" is at the end of the 19th century, which is a transitional era of the upheaval period in southern China, and it is also a dark and ambiguous era. The fictional female giant frog's road from China to Europe reverses and partially overlaps the roadmap of the Scottish naturalist H's journey to the world, and when we realize that in a sense, H's road map to the world is also the road map of imperial colonial expansion after the great geographical discovery, in which the differences between the East and the West cultures are intriguing.
Chinese original | A collection of literary stories
Story Convenience Store
Luo Yijun
Republic of Henan Literature and Art Publishing House
December 2021
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Shi Hang (Book Reviewer, Screenwriter)
The story meeting run by such a good writer is not rich, it is simply rich. The story luo Yijun tells in each section here is actually a matryoshka doll, and he tells the common sorrow or embarrassment in the heavens and the earth, the north, the good and the evil. I also like to watch him recount a story that I know well, such as he said that "Charlotte's Net" is a story that helps friends become Internet celebrities - summed up very well, so that I have some love for both "net" and "red".
"Bemba"
By Liu Liangcheng
As a writer, Liu Liangcheng's name is first closely associated with the essay "One Man's Village". But in a way, he was also a good novelist who was heavily obscured by the reputation of prose. Starting from the earliest "Virtual Land", to the later "Chiseling The Void", "Carrying Words", all the long novels he has written so far can be said to have a unique appearance, both with real realistic care and unexpected extraordinary artistic imagination.
"Bemba" is a novel full of whimsy, with prominent subversion and deconstruction, the concept of the work was born from the Mongolian hero epic "Jianger", from the epic stop, the writer began to tell his own story. The novel revolves around the protagonist Hong gul, imagining a bemba kingdom that has neither aged nor died, and everyone lives at the age of 25, so it has quite fairy tales and allegorical overtones. In his works, Liu Liangcheng uses a magnificent and magical artistic imagination to complete a deep thinking about time, history and human gender.
Chinese original | Literary screenplay
Selected Contemporary Plays: Stop All today (Single Reading 29)
Wu Qi, editor-in-chief
Selected Contemporary Plays: All Stopped today is the 29th series of Single Reading, which has been published consecutively. Although this series is a special feature of the play, the images, essays, reviews, etc. are worth reading, especially Kinte's novel "Cold Water Pit" can not be missed. The novel has previously been circulated among friends and online self-media, and its four-act play of the same name was produced and printed by Feng Junhua's copy, which should be the first official publication. A few years ago, "Flower City Concern" had intended to publish Kinte's novels, and also discussed the publication of Gent's novels with Yilin Publishing House, but unfortunately they were not realized. Hopefully, Ginter, a unique writer, will be read by more people.
The four plays in this series are all first translated by Chinese, written by Mathieu Bertole of Sweden, Sam Max of the United States, emma Crowe of the United Kingdom, and Arisdale McDowell of the United Kingdom, according to the special editor novelist and playwright Chen Si'an: "These four European playwrights, born in the 1970s and 1990s, have a local base in their writing, but the issues explored in their creations are closely related to the general dilemma of globalization." "Single Reading" was formerly known as "One Way Street", which was founded in 2005, and has been renamed "Single Reading" since 2014, which is an irregular theme book. Compared with mook in the general sense, "Single Reading" is committed to cutting-edge ideological culture and youth literary and artistic enlightenment.
The Monkey and the Boy
Wang Meng
Flower City Press
In the long new work "Monkeys and Teenagers", Mr. Wang Meng uses the iconic language of Wang Yang's wanton and muddy sand to let the ninety-year-old protagonist look back on the enthusiastic past of his youth. According to tradition, ninety years old is called "fish back" - "the back of the fish grows on the back similar to the side of the mackerel?" Old and fishy? Fading trajectory? "Those who turn their backs, recognize their ancestors and return to the sect." Wang Meng's "back" narrative also returns and re-claims the source point of life, and "monkey" and "teenager" are just two kinds of mirror images. In the flow of light narrative, there is a unique feeling of the author for all the sorrow and heaviness, cheering and twists, difficulties and explorations, and "turning over and falling over" that he has experienced.
Translate | Novel
"Thoughts"
By David Lodge
Translated by Liu Bin
Nova Press
The British writer David Lodge was both an outstanding novelist and an excellent literary critic. I know him mainly from the novel "Small World", which once had a great influence on the writing of contemporary Western academic intellectuals. Like "Small World", the novel "Thinking..." which has just been translated into China, is also an excellent work focusing on the spiritual composition of contemporary Western intellectuals.
The story of the novel takes place at the University of Gloucester, which seems to return to the familiar college theme, and it is also an old-fashioned, boring extramarital affair story, but the writer has turned out a new idea from the old bottle, and this work is more concerned with how the hero and heroine (the hero Ralph MacChinger is a professor at the Cognitive Science Research Center, and the heroine Helen Reed is a teacher of the new literary writing class) in the face of their own life crisis, how to self-reflect, And finally make the life process of making an appropriate lifestyle suitable for the self. Although it is an exotic story, it can also give Chinese readers useful enlightenment.
Daydreamer
James Thurber
Translated by Xu Hao
Zhejiang Education Press
November 2021
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Zhang Ying (Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Tengyun Magazine)
In the face of ordinary and dull daily life, if you want to escape for a short time, you may need to read the American writer James Thurber's short story collection "Daydreamer". In Thurber's writing, the world is so absurd, but life is so real. Men often try to escape from life and reality in fancy ways, choosing to indulge in the spiritual world, and women seem to be more receptive to reality and reconcile with it. After reading one short story after another, it is not difficult for the reader to feel the embarrassing situation in life. Interestingly, the author seems to be hiding behind the stories he has created, observing the reader with a sly and ironic look. However, the collection of retranslated, renamed and added some new short stories undoubtedly borrowed the light of the movie "Daydreamer", but it is still worth reading.
Top 3 in the popularity list of Chinese and foreign novels in January
1
"Kawago Biography"
By Li Mingchun
Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House
2
3
Duty Editor | Peter Pan
Duty Editor-in-Chief | Deng Siyi
The 2022 Good Book Selection Is in The Call!
Select book types
Books are mainly aimed at public readers, and are divided into three categories: Chinese and foreign genre novels, Chinese and foreign novels, and Chinese and foreign humanities and social sciences.
1. Chinese and foreign genre novels
Long genre novel + short story collection
2. Chinese and foreign novels
Novels + short story collections
3. Chinese and foreign humanities and social sciences
Thought, History, Popular Science, New Knowledge, Art, Culture, Nonfiction Writing and Features, Biographies, Essays, Essays
Publisher's Recommendation Standards
Books published between January and December 2022 (except January, supplemented by good books from December and November of the previous year)
Chinese mainland published
Reprints and reprints are not included
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Zhang Ying
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