City without rain

Author: Tie Ning
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2006-12-01
Features: Tie Ning's three-volume long (novels), titled "The Rose Gate," "City Without Rain," and "The Bathing Girls"; two-volume middle (novels), titled "How Far Is Eternity" and "The Cliff After Noon"; two-volume short (novels), titled "Guests Are Coming" and "Chocolate Fingerprints"; and two-volume essays, titled "Dreams That Walk" and "Beautiful and Clear as Paper-Cuttings." Readers familiar with the author's works may notice that the long novel "City Without Rain" was published in 1994, but in 1996 when compiling the collection, I excluded it from the collection. The reason was that at the time, it seemed that I felt it was not substantial enough! Even because it was too popular, it made the author feel uneasy and doubt the artistic quality of the work. Ten years later, I included it in this series of works because I clearly realized that it was the writing of "City Without Rain" that trained the author's ability to structure long novels, and later works like "The Bathing Girls" and "Foolish Flower" benefited from this structural training to some extent. When a writer summarizes the stages of their work, they should not overlook the writing that serves as a connection and foreshadowing.