Dancer on the Arc Liang Xiaozhong Short Story Collection. Golden Volume

Author: Liang Xiaosheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-03-01
Features: How Liang Xiaosheng is as a writer has long been recognized in various common ways. This Is a Magical Land, Blizzard Tonight, Snow City, and Tree Rings made him the founder of "sent-down youth literature"; Father, Mother, Younger Brother, Mid-Autumn Again, Black Button, and White Hair Pin established him as a representative author of "family-themed novels"; while works like Elected, Silence of Rights, Archives, Speaking, and Death of a Scholar are his powerful middle-length stories that confront reality with profound depth, proving his unwavering commitment to literary realism. This is why 1984 was once called the "Year of Liang Xiaosheng." Consequently, when a newspaper publicly ranked the "Top Ten Writers Who Touch China," Liang Xiaosheng was included on the list. Thus, he is known as the "commoner writer." He is also hailed as the "Chinese Balzac."
Regardless of whether these evaluations are fair or how Liang Xiaosheng himself feels—we have no choice but to decide to publish his selected middle-length stories. And we believe many readers are certainly expecting such a decision to fulfill their desire to understand the full scope of Liang Xiaosheng's middle-length fiction. Once we truly began this task with the author's cooperation, we were indeed surprised—unaware that in two decades, he had written over sixty middle-length stories! In quantity, he is undoubtedly one of the most prolific writers of middle-length fiction in contemporary China. And in terms of the breadth of themes and diversity of styles, he is truly remarkable. In his middle-length stories, from intellectuals to college students, workers, and farmers, from police officers to criminals, and women of all kinds from various eras—a vast array of characters form a literary "River Scene at Qingming" depicting Liang Xiaosheng's portrayal of Chinese society.
Or perhaps, when editing these middle-length stories of Liang Xiaosheng, we truly recalled Balzac's La Comédie Humaine. The writer Liang Xiaosheng once described himself as a "writer standing on an arc" in one of his discussions on writing. He uses the "arc" to symbolize the humanistic quality and stance of literature. Therefore, we have chosen the title Dancers on the Arc for this collection of his middle-length stories—in our view, that "arc" is also composed of the squares of the manuscript paper. He is one of the few writers in China today who still writing by hand, and the pen is his only dance partner.
On the "arc" formed by the squares of the manuscript paper, this writer still tirelessly observes reality, still tirelessly dances—dancing.