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NEW GENERATION

Name: NEW GENERATION
Author: Wang Ping
ISBN: 1-882413-55-5

POEMS FROM CHINA TODAY

edited by Wang Ping & translated by Elizabeth Fox ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 19, 1999

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paper 1-882413-54-7 NEW GENERATION ($25.00; paper $16.00; Jul. 19; 236 pp.; 1-882413-55-5; paper 1-882413-54-7): The Shanghai-born editor, who left China for the US in 1985, gathers together 24 young poets, all born in the “50s and “60s most still living and sometimes managing to publish under the current repressive regime. Writing in the shadow of the Tiananmen Square uprising, these avant-garde writers reject the poetic ideals of their predecessors, the so-called “Misty poets,” who themselves rejected the social realism of Maoism in favor of conventional romanticism. Poet after poet in this vital anthology goes beyond notions of truth and beauty for the grittier realities of everyday life; darkness pervades the experimental forms here, though the poets lack the cynicism of their Western counterparts. Many of these plain-speaking writers struggle with language itself and its relation to objects and silence. The very readable translations, supervised by Ping (who worked with numerous American poets), provide a real sense of the variety of subjects, and each poet is represented with a sample poem in the original, ranging from the confessional verse of Jia Wei about abortions and excrement to Xue Di’s scream of exile, with powerful poetic manifestoes from Liu Manliu and Yu Jian as well.

Pub Date: July 19, 1999

ISBN: 1-882413-55-5

Page Count: 235

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST COMMUNIST VIRGIN
by Wang Ping

- BOOK REVIEW
FOREIGN DEVIL
by Wang Ping

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICAN VISA
by Wang Ping

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I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN

by Jacqueline Harpman ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1997

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I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').

Pub Date: May 1, 1997

ISBN: 1-888363-43-6

Page Count: 224

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ORLANDA
by Jacqueline Harpman & translated by Ros Schwartz

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.