New Reading Master --

Author: Ma Yuan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: In the long river of history and culture, numerous great works have been accumulated, nourishing future generations. What do successful writers and novelists read? Ma Yuan, as a novelist and professor, leads us to get close to the masters with his cleverness and wisdom. Reading Masters is the complete lecture notes of Ma Yuan when he gave literary lectures at Tongji University in Shanghai, and also his first new work after years of silence. In these lecture notes, which are also Ma Yuan's first new work after years of silence, Ma Yuan does not, like many other writers—such as the literary lecture notes of famous world writers like Somerset Maugham, Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino—deliberately emphasize the speaker's identity as a novelist. Here, Ma Yuan speaks as an ordinary reader, engaging in a lively discussion with ordinary audiences and readers about the art of great masters' novels and the intrinsic mysteries of novel writing. The lecture notes are divided into two parts. The first part is Ma Yuan's insightful and accessible interpretation of the works and major works of world-renowned writers such as Hemingway, Hawthorne, Camus, Hasek, Kundera, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Flannery O'Connor, and O. Henry. These writers either once influenced Ma Yuan's own novel writing or are highly admired by ordinary readers. The second part is Ma Yuan's unique insights and understanding of various internal issues in novel writing, such as material, time, language, dialogue, and endings, making it a "comprehensive view of the art of the novel" that is both engaging and easy to understand for lovers of literature and literary appreciators.