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Written on Water

Written on Water

by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Andrew F. Jones, edited by Andrew F. Jones and Nicole Huang, afterword by Nicole Huang

$17.95
$17.95
Asian Literature Available as E-Book Essays & Criticism International Literature
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The June 2023 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated modern Chinese novelists and essayists of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her life as a writer and woman in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. With her vibrant yet meditative style and her sly, sophisticated humor, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and of her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also turns her thoughts to Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, Peking Opera, Shanghainese food, culture, and fashion, all the while upending prevalent attitudes toward women and painting the self-portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms. The book includes illustrations by the author.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681375762
Pages: 272
Publication Date:

Praise

Chang's constant, vivid presence in these essays allows the reader to step wholly into her mind—a collage of the universal and the personal, the minute and the infinite.
—Daljinder Johal, Asymptote Journal

One of the most anticipated books of 2023.
—The Millions

Original, memorable and unlike anything else that has come from the era. A fine contribution to Chinese letters in translation.
—Kirkus Reviews

Daily life, human interactions, and fashion are—particularly for 1940s China—considered female topics, and if Eileen Chang has any political dreams, they are for a space in which women's problems can be accepted and considered.
—Rain Taxi Review

Written on Water showcases why . . . Eileen Chang still enjoys an enormous popularity among readers, both in China and overseas. Chang’s stylized depictions of Chinese manners and morals, her witty inquiry into urban trivia, and her ‘celebration’ of historical contingency are a tableau vivant of modern Chinese lives at their most complex and fascinating.
—David Der-Wei Wang

Before Joan Didion, there was Eileen Chang. A slender, dramatic woman with a taste for livid details and feverish colors, Chang combined Didion's glamor and sensibility with the terrific wit of Evelyn Waugh. She could, with a single phrase, take you hostage.
—Jamie Fisher, The Millions

China's Virginia Woolf.
—The Wall Street Journal

Her writing . . . is cinematically crisp, and phantasmagorical. . . . She had the lunatic sensibilities of Marc Chagall, married to a Henri Matisse-like elegance.
—Ilaria Maria Sala, The Wall Street Journal

As Chang is gaining a growing number of readers in different languages, her work is being positioned where it always belonged, next to other world classics.
—Robert McG. Thomas, The New York Times

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