Literary Good Books · Shortlisted for good books in September 2021
The literary good book list is jointly recommended by more than 50 professional literary publishing institutions under the Literature and Art Publishing Work Committee of the Publishing Association of China, and voted by the presidents and editors-in-chief of each society, and selects the latest 22 good literary books this month, and regularly recommends them every month. The following are the best books shortlisted in September 2021, in no particular order.
"Smoke and Chocolate and Sad Stories"
Author: Miao Wei
Publisher: People's Literature Publishing House
Publication date: August 2021
Price: 35.00 RMB
Reasons for selection
This is a series of sad stories behind the prosperity, but also a spiritual picture book for contemporary urban men and women. In the era of consumption, the life of the urban middle class is strange: radio hosts, screenwriters, psychologists, university professors, company owners, law firm partners... Each protagonist has money, leisure, culture and taste, and his appearance is bright and beautiful, but the restlessness and uneasiness on the back of the soul, those mental illnesses or eccentricities, the fragile body or life force, the shaky emotional relationship, and the identity status that may be zeroed out in an instant, seem to be the fate that they are difficult to escape.
What have they long forgotten?
What are they still insisting on?
Lectures on French Literature
Author: Guo Hong'an
Publisher: Baihuazhou Literature and Art Publishing House
Publication date: September 2021
Price: 36.00 RMB
"Lectures on French Literature" is the first literary lecture by Mr. Guo Hong'an, a member of the Honorary Faculty of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a famous french literary research and translation master. For nearly 40 years, the author has given lectures on French literature in a number of institutions of higher learning or social institutions, and has compiled 10 lectures into a book. The book discusses Montaigne, Balzac, Baudelaire, Saint-Beuve and other famous artists and their masterpieces, which is equivalent to leading the readers to conduct artistic investigation and creative analysis of them, all of which express the author's views on the characteristics and development of French literature in a concise and simple text and in a simple and simple way. At the same time, the author introduces the broad social background and rich life content reflected behind the work, highlights its uniqueness rooted in the tradition of French civilization, traces the trajectory of passion, and fully appreciates the magic of details, reliving the joy of the first encounter with vivid words.
"Running Collection"
Author: Li Jingze
Publisher: Flower City Press
Price: 68.00 RMB
"Running Collection" includes various comments, prefaces, essays and dialogues on literature and art by the famous critic Li Jingze in recent years, and the articles include discussions on the frontier issues of Chinese literature and art, comments by important Chinese and contemporary writers, and meticulous analysis of literary phenomena in recent years. If writing and reading can "go to me", they will enter the vast and boundless world. Literature is to connect all kinds of things scattered in the sky like stars to form a wonderful star map.
"Upside Down to See the World"
Author: [Uruguay] Eduardo Galeano
Translator: Zhang Weijie
Publisher: Hundred Flowers Literary and Art Publishing House
Publication date: July 2021
Price: RMB 69.80
After the collapse of one pole at the pole of the world, capitalism showed a posture of "taking advantage of the victory and attacking". On the eve of the twenty-first century, on the eve of the new millennium, Eduardo Galeoano wrote a book that paints a picture of the neoliberal world for us, exposing the absurdity and inversion of the mirage of prosperity, and sharpening the pen to remove the "classic" system, the "model" system, and lash out to the skin.
Is this history over?
Far from it. The phenomena and problems pointed out by Eduardo Galeano in his book, such as the gap between rich and poor, inequality and injustice, inequality and injustice, as well as the gap between rich and poor, inequality and injustice, and so on, not only still exist today, but even become more and more aggressive. They were, still are, and will probably be the focus of our daily news.
"It is a world of enchantment, inversion, inversion," Karl Marx theorized.
It is an upside-down world that can be reached without a mirror, and Eduardo Galeano proves this. He also asked: Should we turn it over so that it can stand up straight?
"There are paintings in words, Wang Meng said"
Author: Wang Meng
Publisher: Writers Press
Price: 58.00 RMB
"There are paintings in words, Wang Meng said" is divided into five chapters: "The Art of Life", "The Best Interpersonal Relationship", "My Philosophy of Life", "Reading and Understanding People", and "Reverie", selecting Wang Meng's prose on the philosophy of life, philosophy of life, literary criticism and witty phrases, and presenting the "People's Artist" Wang Meng's humorous wisdom experience, speculative understanding of world affairs and profound humanistic thoughts to readers. Wang Meng's rich and legendary life experience, three-dimensional and colorful character, unique insight into life and the world, and the concept of sincere and free prose writing make each work pure and vulgar to elegant. The highlight of this book is also that the creative character ink painter Peng Changzheng has created more than 40 ink cartoons based on the proverbs and golden sentences in Wang Meng's works and speeches; each work is derived from Wang Meng's witty golden sentences, and the text and comics are dwarfed by virtual reality, which is full of fun.
Selected Works of Chi Zijian
Author: Chi Zijian
Price: 498.00 RMB
Chi Zijian's self-selected works (ten volumes) is a novella creation display of Chi Zijian from the beginning of creation to the present. They are "Fairy Tale of the Arctic Village", "All the Nights in the World", "Primitive Scenery", "Sunset Bowl Kiln", "Dancing", "Walking Board with Moonlight", "Fu Fei", "Yang Song", "Retrograde Elf", "Empty Forest Bath house". Chi Zijian is one of the most influential writers in contemporary China, having won the Lu Xun Literature Prize three times and the Mao Dun Literature Prize, and some of his works have been published in Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Sweden, Thailand, Poland and other countries. Since the publication of the first novella "Fairy Tale of the Arctic Village" in People's Literature in 1986, chi Zijian has continuously dedicated more than 50 wonderful novella works to readers with abundant creative power, many of which have become classic works in the history of contemporary literature. As Chi Zijian said: "The water of my novella is the flow of life on that frozen land. ”
The Subtle Truth
Author: [English] John Le Carré
Translator: Martin
Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
Price: 76.00 RMB
The Subtle Truth is a 2013 novel by British spy fiction master John Le Carré.
An anti-terrorist operation code-named "Wild Animals" was launched in the famous British colony of Gibraltar to apprehend an internationally wanted arms dealer. The initiative was initiated by an ambitious foreign minister and a private arms contractor who was also a personal friend of the minister. However, the minister's personal secretary, the protagonist Toby Bell, is unaware.
Toby, anticipating a terrible conspiracy imminent, tries to stop it, only to be transferred overseas at this time. Three years later, a retired British diplomat, Christopher Probin, approached Toby to uncover the disastrous consequences of the counterterrorism operation three years earlier. Toby had to choose between his conscience and his duties...
The Mill
Author: [Danish] Gillerup
Translator: Wu Yukang
Publisher: Lijiang Publishing House
This book is the masterpiece of Nobel Prize winner Gillerup, the exclusive classic variety of the "Nobel Literature Prize Writers' Anthology" of Lijiang Publishing House, telling a tragic story that happened in a large wind mill in Denmark. Although the story in the book takes place some time ago, we can feel that in those calm narratives, there still seems to be a voice that transcends historical barriers, there is a possibility of conversation, and the human, divine and animal nature of secular life is fully released in the book. But more importantly, the reason why those fluctuating processes have not become as pale and tedious as old accounts is that, as the Nobel Prize commentary puts it, they contain superb ideals. This ideal is not an empty gospel, but is implicit in the revelation of a dual contradictory state of human existence, in the opposition and communication between the empirical world and the transcendental world, in the contradiction between the law of Divine Will and the law of nature, between the law of mind and the law of reality. It does not matter what conclusions are drawn, what is important is that people must have feelings that transcend the world on this shore.
《Kuwata Nissin》
Author: Wang Shu
Publisher: Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House
"Mulberry Field Sun Nuan" is a novel written by contemporary Chinese writer Wang Shu. In 1983, the household contract responsibility system was extended to the village of He Jiayuan on the east coast of the East China Sea, and in the autumn of that year, the Xinglan family ate a whole bowl of white rice for the first time in more than twenty years. The days are booming, the whole family works together to plan to save money to build a new house, just at this time, the bad news came, Xinglan's husband Huang Tao and the eldest son Chunjin died unexpectedly, leaving only Xinglan and three underage children Qiujin, Baojin, and Zhenjin to support the family. In the face of the pressure of poverty, the wounds of broken families, and the sneers of others, this family of four endured the double torture of mind and body, but they still stubbornly and firmly lived, not only that, but also lived decently and beautifully!
The author uses exquisite language to weave a vivid picture of rural production and life in the southeast coastal areas in the early stage of reform and opening up, with writing like threading needles, fine stitches, and a solid texture of life.
"The Story of Ordinary Life"
Author: Rao Pingru
Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press
Price: RMB79.00
The companion chapter of "Ping Ru Mei Tang" meets a sincere, optimistic and kind soul.
"Pingsheng Ji" is Rao Pingru's posthumous manuscript, which can be said to be his autobiography and records his life.
Childhood, horse racing career, public-private partnership, going to the countryside to see and hear, making wooden cattle and horses in the earthworks, adventures in old age... In a calm and meticulous tone, the author presents a personal history from birth to death, spanning a century. The storm of history has fallen on an ordinary person, and all kinds of things in between constitute the extraordinary memories of a generation. Eventually this drop of water re-entered the torrent of the times...
Night Watch
Author: Yu Feng
Publisher: Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House
Price: 42.00 RMB
"Night Watch" is the latest novel by Shanghai writer Yu Feng, who won the "2018 Shanhua Biennial Literature Award" and some works were included in the "2019 Harvest Literature Ranking".
When the young man in the mountain village woke up driving a cow, his fiancée Wu Sanmei ran away with the mountain goods, and the tall grass that drove the cow madly cut a meadow and did not understand the hatred. The cousin persuaded the cow to work as a handyman at the Golden Crane Nursing Home on the outskirts of the metropolis, and the cow drove to a strange world: the old men and women in the hospital were still energetic, and they did things every day, which caused headaches for the cousin who was the head of the nursing home.
Driving cattle is not a "little dumb" who does not like to talk, and the female dean needs him to be such an inconspicuous "little countryman", she secretly explains to the bull driving as a good secret agent in the courtyard, especially pay attention to what the old people do at night. Driving a cow has become a night watchman in the nursing home, and he has the ability to climb in the mountains: a "night monkey" climbs on the outer wall of the nursing home group building, and his curious eyes look at the secrets of this small world that have been hidden by night for a long time.
The secret cannot be looked at at random, and the driving cow body involuntarily fell into the whirlpool, helplessly watching the waves of the old people's home.
If the female director is also an old man, then other old people can only be regarded as the cash crop of the nursing home.
The truth is like a whale, slowly floating out of the sea...
"The Guide"
Author: Li Hongwei
Price: RMB 59.80
In the next 2498, mankind will enter a "new civilization period", with resource depletion, environmental pollution, and frequent earthquakes, and the earth has been pushed to an extreme situation. A new social governance program was implemented, and the whole world was divided into "abundance society" and "society of scarcity". Happiness and sadness are still played out every day, but the difference is that every decision people make will be linked to the "final question" – "This time, do you choose the left hand or the right hand?" ”
The book consists of three parts, namely "Lunar Phase Deposition", "Viscous Rain From the Moon", and "Moon Hermit", whose clues are different, but they are combined into one, forming a collage, overlapping avant-garde artistic effect.
The Unstructed Life
Author: Li Weichang
Publisher: Yilin Publishing House
Price: 49.00 RMB
Critic Li Weichang reads a collection of essays. Books and life can be seen in each other.
Baudelaire, Flaubert, Chekhov, Chandler, Nabokov, Kiyoharu Matsumoto, Glass, Naipaul, Sontag, Bullock, Winterson... The life we experience ourselves helps to understand the growth of a good writer, how many difficulties he has overcome, how many crises he has resolved, and his belief that life will be interrupted but cannot be destroyed.
The author hooks the dots, traces and traces, from a book to a person, from a clue to lead out a story, from the book to the outside of the book, witnessing countless brilliant and displaced lives.
"The Bankruptcy of the Last Two Generations"
Author: [Japanese] NHK Special Program Recording Group
Translator: Wenwen Shi
Price: 38.00 RMB
In Japan, the "bankruptcy of the last two generations" caused by "living with family" is becoming increasingly common.
Leaving a job to care for an elderly parent loses your income;
Returning to the workplace and earning money at work will lead to parents living alone during the day.
The "counter-current" children who return to their parents in middle age are caught in a dilemma.
Today, when the traditional way of existence of the family is shaken, can we avoid "two generations losing both"?
The Call of Life
Author: Lin Qiang
Publisher: Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House
This book is a documentary literary work. In the 40 years that writer Lin Qiang has gone deep into the Gongga Mountains of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, he has recorded many heroic and exemplary character deeds.
Among them were Ji Ga, a Tibetan teacher who had been quietly dedicating himself to a high-altitude rural primary school for 27 years; Du Aihu, a graduate student at Tsinghua University who had been teaching at an altitude of 4,000 meters for 5 years; Ge Gelat, a guide who had done a good job all his life; Master Bai, an old Han Bai who repaired cars under Gongga Mountain; Chen Fubin, a geologist who had studied Gongga Mountain for fifty years; Fan Shufang, a folk doctor who used Gongga Mountain as a big pharmacy; a leprosy couple who had lived under Gongga Mountain for 60 years; and Sun Qian, a good secretary who the people under Gongga Mountain could not forget There is Silang Zeren, the Tibetan county magistrate who runs affairs for the people; there is Zhang Dongpan, a folk scholar who has been walking on Gongga Mountain for a long time; and there is Dorji Tashi, a member of the Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference who has trained more than 80 orphans in Gongga Mountain to become university students for 20 years...
These stories of tenacious and tenacious life, the courage of grassroots people and cadres to dedicate, and the solidarity and mutual assistance of compatriots of all nationalities are either touching, touching, or tear-jerking, and full of strength to move China.
The Red Bank
Author: Zhang Weiping
Publishers: Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House, Beiyue Literature and Art Publishing House
This is a splendid literary masterpiece that brilliantly shows the great achievements and pioneering achievements of our Party on the financial front. Taking the development and evolution of the Xingxian Peasant Bank on the banks of the Yellow River under the leadership of our Party during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression as the material for the important historical event of becoming the predecessor of the Chinese Minmin Bank, the communist Party member Zhang Gancheng and the underground Communist Party member Liu Xianggeng led everyone to establish the Red Bank, from motion, preparation, design, printing, transportation, distribution, to growth, and went through hardships; along with the difficult growth of the Red Bank, the reactionary forces also grew up. A devastating crackdown on the Red Bank. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, through military and financial struggles, the Red Bank developed steadily, strongly supported the development of the border areas, supported the growth of the Eighth Route Army, and ushered in the founding of New China.
"Green Snow Buds: A Cultural Chronicle of White Tea"
Author: Zhang Xianqing
Publisher: Henan Literature and Art Publishing House
Price: 102.00 RMB
"Green Snow Buds: A Cultural History of White Tea" is the latest work of the famous humanistic scholar Zhang Xianqing, who tells the colorful life history of green snow bud white tea with simple and elegant brushstrokes and comprehensive and clear context.
Green snow bud is the most representative famous tea in the Taimu Mountain area in history, and is also regarded as the ancestor of white tea. The name and spread of green snow bud tea is closely related to the Chinese tradition. This book examines the rise of green snow bud white tea in the Taimushan area and the development and changes in different eras from the aspects of landscape, green snow, tea nature, genealogy, and reconstruction, emphasizes the importance of analyzing the interrelationship between a tea and landscape landscape, local society, and cultural traditions from the perspective of social life history, and deeply explores the development of white tea culture in Taimushan, the origin of contemporary Chinese white tea and the main tea area, so as to enrich the research on tea culture in contemporary China.
"Drama Talk: Ten Lectures on Chinese Peking Opera"
Author: Zhao Juan
Publisher: Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House
Price: 59.00 RMB
Understanding the beauty of China begins with knowing Peking Opera; falling in love with Peking Opera begins with a book called "Drama Talk".
This is an introductory reading of Peking Opera that refreshes your inherent cognition, a cultural invitation to visit the halls of Chinese opera and appreciate the canon of Chinese music, and a guide for the cultivation of Peking Opera fans who let the opera lyrics be reborn in contemporary times.
Zhao Juan, the author of this book, can be described as "Door Qing" on the stage and off stage of Peking Opera, inside and outside the play, she is not only a Peking Opera performance artist who has been practicing for more than 30 years, but also a doctor of opera who has been studying the art of Peking Opera for more than ten years, and at the same time she is a senior opera director and drama critic who knows her name in China.
The Magic Mountain
Author: [de] Thomas Mann
Translator: Yang Wuneng
Publisher: Times Literature and Art Publishing House
Price: RMB 118.00
"The Magic Mountain" is a masterpiece of novels by Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann. Centered on a sanatorium, the novel depicts many feudal aristocrats and bourgeois figures in Europe, all of whom are parasites of society. The whole sanatorium is filled with a morbid, dying atmosphere, symbolizing the decline of capitalist civilization. Through the clash of ideas between the characters, the work reveals the kinship between decadence and fascism. This book was translated by the famous translator Mr. Yang Wuneng.
The Tale of the Classic of Mountains and Seas
Author: Song Lin
Publisher: East China Normal University Press
This book is a collection of mythological poems written by Song Lin in recent years, creatively rewriting the archetypes of the ancient myths contained in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and other classics with personal imagination, and attaching a large number of page notes, on the one hand, it is convenient for readers to deeply understand the metaphors of poetry, on the other hand, it re-evokes the vitality of ancient classics, so that many mythological images that have been dimmed by historicization re-emit poetic light. With decades of creative skills, Song Lin creatively used traditional Chinese culture, and these considerable achievements will leave an indelible mark for future new poetry creation.
"Country Legends"
Author: Yu Kexun
Price: 45.00 RMB
The Legends of the Countryside is a collection of thirty-four short stories written in Huangmei Water Township against the backdrop of the southeastern Hubei region in the 1950s and 1960s. These stories tell the unique folk customs of the land of fish and rice, and create a vivid character. Although floods visit this place from time to time, the people of this land still tenaciously bloom their vitality and pursue their own lives. The thin fire that kills the foot fish abandons the bride to chase the fish when entering the cave house; the village teacher rebuilds the school that was destroyed by the flood over and over again; the husband of the third sister-in-law drowns, and the sad and crazy third sister-in-law raises torches on the shore every day to show the way for passing ships... Under the torrent of the times, they are all the tiniest dust, but there are also big scenes in the lives of small people.
"Immortals"
Author: Xu Yan
This is the first collection of short stories by the emerging novelist Xu Yan. Seven stories, writing a full and juicy "Gangnam" and a verdant "desire". Orphans and disabled children, elderly people living alone, families going south, victims of private lending, disabled people and able-bodied people in welfare factories, they either fled Vietnam, Beijing, Wuhan, Hangzhou and returned, or from Ili, Xin'anjiang, or relocated to Antu, all their lives in a small city in Jiangnan, they pretend that they are not animals, reason will not fall into the lower reaches of the body; they pretend to go with the flow, do not take the tip, do not go out, and digest that little bit of unwillingness and incomprehension behind closed doors... The sunlight of Jiangnan City warmly baked its people, new things were revisited, stories were newly solved, and they once thought they were infinitely close to the sun. Among them, "Meat Forest" was first published in the 60th anniversary commemorative special issue of "Harvest"; "Crow Factory" was first published in the 40th anniversary special issue of "October"; "Red Wall, Green Water, Yellow Glass" was first published in "Flower City", which was selected in "Novel Selection" and "Novel Monthly"; "Heart Sutra" won the Fifth "People's Literature • Purple And Gold Star" Short Story Award.
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Source: Literature Good Book List WeChat public account
Text editor: Fu Lin
Editor-in-Charge: Xia Ping
Review: Zhu Yan