Liang Xiaosheng's Short Story Collection--Dancers on the Arc (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, Tonight There Is a Blizzard, 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 writer of "family romance"; while works like Elected, Right to Silence, Archives, Speaking, and Death of a Scholar are his powerful middle-length pieces that confront reality with profound depth, proving he has always adhered to the literary belief of focusing on reality—so much so that in 1984, he was hailed as the "Year of Liang Xiaosheng." Consequently, when a newspaper publicly ranked the "Ten Most Touching Writers in China," Liang Xiaosheng made the list. Thus, he is called the "commoner writer." And so, he is honored as the "Balzac of China."
Regardless of whether these evaluations are appropriate or how Liang Xiaosheng himself feels—we have resolutely decided to publish a collection of his middle-length novels. And we believe that 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 writer's cooperation, we were indeed surprised—never expecting that in twenty years, he had written over sixty middle-length novels! In quantity, he is undoubtedly one of the most prolific writers of middle-length fiction in contemporary Chinese literature. And in terms of the breadth of themes and diversity of styles, he is also truly remarkable. In his middle-length novels, from intellectuals to college students, workers, peasants, police officers, and criminals, as well as various female figures from different eras—countless characters form a literary "River Scene at Qingming" of Chinese society as depicted by Liang Xiaosheng.
Or perhaps, when editing these middle-length novels of Liang Xiaosheng, we truly recalled Balzac's La Comédie Humaine. The writer Liang Xiaosheng once described himself in a creative discussion as a "writer standing on an arc," using the "arc" to symbolize the humanistic quality and stance of literature. Therefore, we have also used his own words as the title of this collection of middle-length novels—Dancers on the Arc. 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 with a pen, 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.