There is no doubt that in the newspaper network, there are many short and medium stories, and there are also many high-quality works, in order to introduce them to the majority of readers, in 2022, the China Writers Network specially launched the "Preferential Short and Medium Stories" column. Once a month, it is connected online in the form of audio and video, and listens to experts and scholars share a short story that they have read and liked. The 7 promoters in this issue are Xu Gang, Ma Bing, Chen Tao, Guo Bingru, Huang Dehai, Nie Meng, and He Tongbin.
— Editor's Note
Featured works in this issue
"Then bright moon" Chen Shixu
Novella, Beijing Literature, No. 3, 2022
"Eighteen Broken Things" Li Qingxi
Novella, Mountain Flower, No. 3, 2022
"The King Doesn't See the King" Yang Shaoheng
Novella, Hunan Literature, No. 3, 2022
"Guess What I'm Thinking" Wan Ma Tse-dan
Short story, Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 2, 2022
"Clean Face" Tao Liqun
Novella, Hibiscus, No. 1, 2022
"Song Riding a Goose and His Woman" Xu Zechen
Short story, Flower City, No. 1, 2022
"Listening" Zhou You'an
Short story, Zhongshan, No. 1, 2022
Xu Gang's recommended works:
Novella, Beijing Literature, No. 3, 2022
Chen Shixu, "Then the Bright Moon"
The novel is composed of four subsections with classical interest, "Midsummer Night", "Sealed Tank Wine", "Qingming Willow" and "Linjiang Immortal". Although the story structure is intertwined, the subsections can be written independently. The novel takes us to the distant years of Zhiqing, although there is no shortage of common sections in Zhiqing literature, such as through exaggerated and even dramatic paragraphs, pointing the spearhead of criticism at the hypocrisy and absurdity of the power system, but we will eventually find that what is worth salvaging in those distant years is always the moment of those flashes of humanity. Therefore, at the end of the novel, what is touching is precisely the power that rises up in the text, which is very simple and very quiet. In short, the novel is very easy to read, and it is also very readable, which fully realizes the narrative skills of the writer.
Ma Bing's recommended works:
Novella, Mountain Flower, No. 3, 2022
Li Qingxi's "Eighteen Broken Things"
Gyeongsai is a literary veteran who has devoted himself to the research and practice of new note narratives for many years, and has a lot of experience. "Eighteenth Street Fragments" continues his previous "Notes on the World" brushwork, distilling the vivid memories of teenagers in the form of scattered perspective, and presenting the permanence of the world in a detailed narrative. There is God in the novel, there is poetry in the small fragments, and in a few strokes, the hearts of teenagers and the sorrows of adults are depicted with timeless and profound meaning. The novel has no core plot, but it allows countless details of life about innocence and sophistication, pain and pity, hardship and stubbornness, until the point is reached, but it leaves a lasting return. After reading it, people are like the teenagers in the text, "In the sparkling sunset afterglow, I know that the night is approaching, the stories of the eighteen rooms are scattered like clouds, and the teenagers do not know the taste of sorrow, but also have relatives."
Chen Tao's recommended works:
Yang Shaoheng,"The King Doesn't See the King"
The reason for recommending this work is more consideration in how we use literature to deal with the subject matter of officialdom, which is of great social concern. "The King Does Not See the King" is different from the official literature in the general sense, although the work is an official novel, it does not stay in the official, nor stays in the scene, but treats the official field as a huge and complicated background, focusing on the performance of this group of cadres in work and life, and using this to convey the author's thinking. On the one hand, this work intervenes in reality, but on the other hand, it does not preach and criticize, and the narrative is not shocking, but under the calm, there is an undercurrent that is turbulent and thought-provoking.
Guo Bingru's recommended works:
Wan Ma Tse-dan "Guess What I'm Thinking"
Barley wine is a daily routine in Tibet, and many families can brew it themselves. Yet when it became a consumer product, used to mark people's identity, status, wealth, and social resources, it had become as a modern spectacle in the eyes of the villagers as buggies, private secretaries, and city women, and not only that, it even vaguely connected to the extralegal land of desire. Wan Ma Tse-dan borrowed barley wine to write about the cold side of daily life in Tibetan areas after being molded by consumerism, and today, when everyone is surrounded by a huge market torrent, his story is not only close to a certain reality of survival in Tibet, but also related to all of us.
Huang Dehai's recommended works:
Tao Liqun "Clean Face"
The title is a profession that exists in certain regions and is a profession that cleanses the body of the dying person. The person who does this profession is to send away the person who is about to die cleanly, and she herself seems to be trapped in some kind of special curse, and it is difficult to have a normal life, so she has to learn to live with loneliness and loneliness, learn to live with the continuous old diseases, and constantly practice to live with the end of the world waiting not far away. It is in such a scene that the author uses quiet and meticulous ink to write little by little the fate of "this one" clean-faced person, including her dreamy youth and the sudden bad luck she suffered, and tries to explore the process of her reconciliation with fate, including those who brought her bad luck, so as to wipe her soul clean in a sense.
Nie Meng's recommended works:
Short story, Flower City, No. 1, 2022
Xu Zechen, "Song Riding a Goose and His Woman"
"Song Riding a Goose and His Woman", another short production of Xu Zechen's "Crane Top Detective" series. The "Crane Top Series" has multiple faces as soon as it appears, it deals with the unfinished business of "Dashui Story" such as "Going North", is the testing ground for the author's next long detective novel shell, in addition, it is itself, a collection of novels that follows a certain "Trinity", which together with the "Flower Street Series", "Beijing Drift Series" and "Canal Series", powerfully explains and expands Xu Zechen's literary map.
As for what kind of position "Song Riding Goose" occupies within the "Crane Top Series", it will not be clear until the end of this series. Because in addition to practicing the author's consistent philosophy of short stories - "every word must stand", "write short stories", "freeze in a small place", "iceberg theory", "stupid method", "drain the water", "refined and pure"--in addition to taking on multiple responsibilities such as sharing resources and differences with other companions. The picture of the township and the permanence of the world's people's hearts are slowly unfolded in the narration of a grass-roots police station director, and the author intends to reconstruct a time and space when the voyage of the times has not yet been fully transparent, and opens a corner to let us have a glimpse of the accident hidden in the depths of people's hearts.
He Tongbin's recommended works:
Zhou You'an's "Listening"
Zhou You'an is a "new face" of the novel's vision, as a young poet, she injects her novel creation with the special problem awareness, sensibility, spatial experience and the wandering nature of the subject derived from contemporary poetry, and at the same time brings a surprising and uneasy sense of jumping, agility and a delicate experience of more in-depth contemporaryness to the novel narrative with the poet's language and rhetoric. Hu Sang believes that "'Listening' touches on the fission of the relationship between contemporary people who have been stripped out of the family and others", which occurs not only in the young protagonist "Dong Chengyu" or our young author Zhou You'an, but also in every sensitive individual in an urban space characterized by naked bodies, panoramic open vision, virtual worlds, digital algorithms, etc. With the sensitivity, stubbornness, and even jerkiness of young people, "Listening" touches on the symptomatic proposition of a very universal contemporary subject's situation. This new work is the first "discovery" of the new column "Discovery creativity" of the "Zhongshan" Creative Writing Promotion Plan, and also welcomes teachers and students majoring in creative writing across the country to pay more attention to and support this column.
Excellent short story
Recommended groups
Horsemen
Professor of the College of Literature of Shandong University
Guo Bingru
Professor of the Department of Chinese, Sun Yat-sen University
Huang Dehai
Associate Editor of Sinan Literary Anthology
Xu Gang
Associate Researcher, Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Nie Meng
Associate Researcher of innovation and research department of China Writers Association
He Tongbin
Associate Editor of Yangtze River Literary Review
Chen Tao
Editor-in-Chief of China Writers Network
Wang Yang
Deputy Editor-in-Chief of China Writers Network
Related Reading:
【Video】Select short and medium stories (phase 2) | Which of these novels has won your heart?
【Video】Preferably short and medium stories (issue 1) | The first new novel of the new year, read it!
Editor: Deng Jiefeng
Second instance: Liu Ya
Third trial: Chen Tao, Wang Yang