Selected Short Stories of China in the 20th Century

Author: Bai Ye, Qin Gong (editors)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-06-01
Features: If the 20th-century Chinese literature is compared to an unbroken spiritual river, then the short story is undoubtedly one of its most vibrant and colorful ripples. A fact worth clarifying is that compared to the long, well-known masterpieces people have been familiar with for a long time, the limitation in length does not necessarily mean a lack of artistic quality or depth of thought in short stories. On the contrary, in a certain sense, the constraints in scale and length actually infuse them with abundant vitality. As the "light cavalry" in the literary family, short stories have always been at the forefront of literary concepts and literary creation, being one of the most active and exploratory literary forms. The Selected Short Stories of 20th-Century China is an anthology of short stories selected according to the standard of "classic." Due to the length constraints of the anthology's entries and the subjective differences in aesthetic tastes between the editors and readers, the inevitability of "omissions" is unavoidable. But fairly speaking, the works in the anthology mostly represent, from different perspectives, the highest level of Chinese fiction creation in different periods of the 20th century. Among the vast repository of modern and contemporary Chinese fiction, these works can roughly outline the spiritual lineage of a century of Chinese literature (fiction).