{"title":"Books by Eileen Chang","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780141189390","title":"Half a Lifelong Romance","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom one of twentieth-century China's greatest writers and the author of \u003ci\u003eLust, Caution\u003c\/i\u003e, this is an unforgettable story of a love affair set in 1930s Shanghai. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eManzhen is a young worker in a Shanghai factory, where she meets Shijun, the son of wealthy merchants. Despite family complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together - until circumstances force them apart. When they are reunited after a separation of many years, can they start their relationship again? Or is it destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime? This affectionate and captivating novel tells the moving story of an enduring love affair, and offers a fascinating window onto Chinese life in the first half of the twentieth century.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEileen Chang was born in Shanghai in 1920. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong but returned to Shanghai in 1941 during the Japanese occupation, where she established her reputation as a literary star. She moved to America in 1955 and died in Los Angeles in 1995.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKaren S. Kingsbury taught and studied in Chinese-speaking cities for nearly two decades, and currently lives in Pennsylvania, USA. She has translated \u003ci\u003eLove in a Fallen City\u003c\/i\u003e for Penguin Classics, as well as other essays and stories by Chang.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A giant of modern Chinese literature' \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Eileen Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature' Ang Lee\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'A dazzling and distinctive fiction writer' \u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e'Chang's world is a stark and mysterious place where people strive to find their way in love but often fail under the pressures of family, tradition, and reputation' \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43201425178802,"sku":"9780141189390","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141189390_6db9dd2c-9ce7-4c48-8f5f-1fbf1d63cd77.jpg?v=1786011581"},{"product_id":"9780141189369","title":"Love in a Fallen City","description":"\u003cp\u003eEileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eLove in a Fallen City\u003c\/i\u003e, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43399651983538,"sku":"9780141189369","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141189369_57ff61ca-4bf1-4a6f-98c9-d288552009ac.jpg?v=1786011577"},{"product_id":"9780141034386","title":"Lust, Caution","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days playing mahjong and drinking tea with high society ladies. But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces and things are not always what they seem in wartime. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJiazhi’s life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin’s bullet. Yet as she waits for him to arrive at their liaison, Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is cut out to be a femme fatale and coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA passionate tale of espionage, deception and love, \u003ci\u003eLust, Caution\u003c\/i\u003e is accompanied here by four further dazzling short stories by Eileen Chang.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56224487375221,"sku":"9780141034386","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141034386_b5531f49-147f-47b7-ace5-19f8d839f696.jpg?v=1786032698"},{"product_id":"9780241752302","title":"Jasmine Tea","description":"90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books‘But how sweet a fruit the ‘suppose’ must be, that people will sup and sup on it! A juicy fruit, like a lychee but without the pit, sparkling and light green: a fruit that hides the tart within the sweet.’In this haunting collection of stories, a young man’s obsession leads to tragedy and a woman’s bitterness poisons a family’s legacy. In delicate, piercing prose, Chang captures a world of quiet cruelties and calamitous desires in pre-revolutionary China.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56230362808693,"sku":"9780241752302","price":5.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241752302_e4ec69ec-641e-4a7a-9e41-86c49c6ba471.jpg?v=1786012292"},{"product_id":"9781681371276","title":"Little Reunions","description":"\u003cb\u003eA best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eNow available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303697428853,"sku":"9781681371276","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681371276_75bab656-c104-4746-85cd-7cdf5d7073d7.jpg?v=1789395905"},{"product_id":"9781529985979","title":"Young at the Time","description":"From one of the great Chinese authors of the twentieth century, these newly translated stories illuminate the most intimate matters of the human heartSince childhood, Ruliang has sketched the same face in the margins of his books, tracing its lines without knowing why. Years later, he meets Cynthia – and recognises it at once. As their lives draw together and drift apart, what once seemed like fate begins to feel more uncertain. In these brief, evocative stories, Eileen Chang traces the pull of memory, love and chance.   Includes the stories: Young at the Time, Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift and Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy NowBRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.   ** The perfect stocking filler for short fiction readers**","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56369016111477,"sku":"9781529985979","price":9.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781529985979_0ca56499-c89e-4705-a4f9-0912e617edb8.jpg?v=1786023355"},{"product_id":"9781681375748","title":"Time Tunnel","description":"\u003cb\u003e“China's Virginia Woolf.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow in English for the first time, stories and essays about love, sex, and migration by one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTime Tunnel\u003c\/i\u003e offers a new selection of stories and essays, some translated for the first time into English, drawn from every stage of the career of the great Chinese writer Eileen Chang, from her debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai through her flight, following the Revolution, to Hong Kong and America, to her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Genesis,\" left out of the two volumes of stories with which Chang made her name in the 1940s, shows her transfixing eye for visual detail and aptitude for brilliant verbal description, even as it looks forward to the improvisatory, open-ended approach to narrative she developed in later years. \"Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift\" addresses the perils and uncertainties—the vertigo—of exile, while in the late masterpiece \"Those Old Schoolmates They're All Quite Classy Now,\" Chang looks back across the better part of a lifetime to the world she came from and the changes that have come with the years. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEssays like \"Return to the Frontier\" and \"New England Is China,\" both written in English, broaden our wonder at the effervescent and melancholy genius of a transformative modern writer.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56419970089333,"sku":"9781681375748","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681375748_9421f77b-717f-4e19-986c-a8f2ab664001.jpg?v=1786024552"},{"product_id":"naked-earth","title":"Naked Earth","description":"An NYRB Classics Original\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSet in the early years of Mao’s China, \u003ci\u003eNaked Earth\u003c\/i\u003e is the story  of two earnest young people confronting the grim realities of  revolutionary change. Liu Ch’üan and Su Nan meet in the countryside  after volunteering to assist in the new land reform program. Eager to  build a more just society, they are puzzled and shocked by the  brutality, barely disguised corruption, and ruthless careerism they  discover, but then quickly silenced by the barrage of propaganda and  public criticism that is directed at anyone who appears to doubt a  righteous cause. Joined together by the secret of their common dismay,  they remain in touch when Liu departs to work on a newspaper in Peking,  where Su Nan eventually also moves. Something like love begins to grow  between them—but then a new round of purges sweeps through the  revolutionary ranks.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the greatest and most loved of modern  Chinese writers, Eileen Chang illuminates the dark corners of the human  existence with a style of disorienting beauty. \u003ci\u003eNaked Earth\u003c\/i\u003e,  unavailable in English for more than fifty years, is a harrowing tale of  perverted ideals, damaged souls, deepest loneliness, and terror.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484400066933,"sku":"9781590178348","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781590178348.jpg?v=1786266494"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-eileen-chang.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}