Böcker av Su Tong

Midnight Stories collects ten tales of small-town life with a macabre twist, including a business scheme involving a Madonna lookalike, a disastrous roof repair job, and bloody murder over a missold watermelon. Through a darkly comic lens, Su Tong interweaves cruelty and kindness in a characteristically surreal mode both nightmarish and lyrical.

*Missives from the Masses *opens award-winning author Su Tong's newest selection of short stories. From Qianmei, the only one in the dark about her terminal cancer, to the unloved undertaker with seemingly cursed hands, this collection presents darkly humorous and strange accounts of hidden lives eked out during China's turbulent economic rise.

The brutal realities of the dark places Su Tong depicts in this collection of novellas set in 1930s provincial China -- worlds of prostitution, poverty, and drug addiction -- belie his prose of stunning and simplebeauty. The title novella, "Raise the Red Lantern," which became a critically acclaimed film, tells the story of Lotus, a young woman whose father's suicide forces her to become the concubine of a wealthy merchant. Crushed by loneliness, despair, and cruel treatment, Lotus finds her descent into insanity both a weapon and a refuge."Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes" is an account of a family's struggles during one momentous year; plagued by disease, death, and the shady promise of life in a larger town, the family slowly disintegrates.Finally, "Opium Family" details the last years of a landowning clan whose demise is brought about by corruption, lust, and treachery -- fruits of the insidious crop they harvest.

Memoirs & micro-essays from the master of implication among China's top writers. It is composed of sanwen, a traditional free prose form. Ranging from boisterous urban sketches to quiet musings on humanity's strange & secret compulsions, Su Tong pulls back the curtain in a detached style, unafraid to throw the reader an occasional knowing wink.

Disgraced Secretary Ku has been banished from the Party - it has been officially proved he does not have a fish-shaped birthmark on his bottom and is therefore not the son of a revolutionary martyr, but the issue of a river pirate and a prostitute.

Set during the fall-out of the Cultural Revolution, these bizarre and delicate stories capture the collision of the old China of vanished dynasties, with communism and today's tiger economy. The mad woman on the bridge wears a historical gown which she refuses to take off.