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Top 10 Chinese and foreign novels in April
"Searchlight Good Book" is hosted by Tencent Group + Reading Group, co-organized by QQ Reading, WeChat Reading, Tencent News, and undertaken by Searchlight Book Critics Association. According to the vote of 21 readers, 10 Chinese and foreign novels, 10 Chinese and foreign genre novels, and 15 Chinese and foreign humanities and social science books are evaluated every month. According to the reader's vote, the popular top 3 books in the 3 lists per month are rated.
We pay tribute to those good works that have "the beauty of literature, the truth of thought, the weight of history, attention to the present, elegant narrative, and beautiful expression", creativity, imagination, and exploration.
The following are the top ten Chinese and foreign novels in April 2022, in no particular order.
Thanks to the authors, translators, editors-in-charge, and producers and publishers of these works.
Chinese original | Novel
"The History of the Dead Ming Dynasty"
Written by Tai Jingnong
Guangxi Normal University Press
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Xia Lie (Professor, Hangzhou Normal University)
The initial curiosity lies in Tai Jingnong and the "History of the Dead Ming Dynasty", which have not been seen in the past, and finally thought that it was a reprint of the old book. The result was unexpected, it was actually the first new edition, which contained a public case that had been collected for more than 80 years since the completion of the book. When the book was written at a time when the War of Resistance was glued and the Kuomintang retreated to the southwest, the only possible reader at that time was Chen Duxiu, who said in a letter to Taiwan, "When revising, I hope to make it a history rather than a novel." However, Xu is a novel written in the style of "new story compilation" that borrows from the past and the present, insinuation, which is really a dangerous book, which was held unpublished that year, and has since become a kind of "drawer literature", and now it is reproduced in the name of Tai Jingnong's last novel. After this book, Tai Jingnong went to Taiwan in 1946, went to Taiwan, studied history, focused on calligraphy, and had another life. Therefore, the first meaning of this book is to evoke a period of archaeological and historical significance in creation.
"The History of the Dead Ming Dynasty" tells the history of turmoil and deceit at the time of the ming and qing dynasties. The novel comprehensively uses the history of Zhengye, which can be said to stand on a solid historical footing, the historical materials are rich and detailed, and the sentences have come from. However, what was embraced in it was Tai Jingnong's ironic heart, which seemed to tell history everywhere, but it was everywhere a metaphor for the present, showing the intellectuals' anxiety about the glue of the War of Resistance and the anger and criticism of the Kuomintang government's passive resistance to Japan. At that time, writers and scholars often had the narrative trend of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and the "History of the Dead Ming Dynasty" was actually one of them, and this historical sentiment was just as Chen Yinke said: "The history of the Ming and Qing dynasties is both new and old, and the good things are discussed by whom." Although the preference for the success or failure of the novel is the wisdom of the benevolent and the wise, as a new literary cadre and a close friend of Lu Xun, he chose to use the form of traditional saying as a kind of "return" of himself during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.
Chinese original | Novel
"Everything About The Farewell"
Inside the road
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
February 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Wang Chunlin (Professor of Shanxi University, Editor-in-Chief of Novel Review)
In a sense, we might as well understand Lu nei's novel as a textual result of the superposition of Proust's Remembrance of the Watery Years and Nabokov's Lolita. An objectively existing textual fact is that it is the seemingly contradictory existence of "farewell" and "reunion" that fundamentally supports this novel in the road.
Proust opened the floodgates of his memories with the help of little Madeland dim sum in "Remembrance of The Age of Water", and "Everything About Farewell" in the road is through the unexpected reunion of Li Bai and Zeng Xiaoran, so that those smokey past events come and go in an out-of-control state, and the similarities between the two cannot be easily denied in any case.
If Nabokov is told throughout the story of a middle-aged man who immigrated from France to the United States, Hen Humbert, out of self-restraint pedophilia, has a crush on the landlady's 12-year-old daughter Lolita and has a crush on Lolita, then Lune's "Everything About Farewell" will occasionally touch on unrequited love across age boundaries, but its main theme is not in this regard. If we must find commonalities between the two, then, I think, it is obvious that it must only be the writing of lust.
Chinese original | Novel
Golden River
By Lu Min
Yilin Publishing House
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Pan Kaixiong (Critic, Senior Media Person)
"Golden River" is the most complex, rich and distinctive of Lu Min's novels I have ever read. The work takes the family narrative as the incision, and places the history of personal and family life under the grand historical background of reform and opening up, such as the establishment of the special zone, the emergence of private enterprises, the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, the establishment of the Shanghai Business, the establishment of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the family planning policy, the pairing of students, the revival of Kunqu opera and other key words of the times are concretely presented in the work, and on the whole, a story about moral emotions, material creation and changes of the times is intricately intertwined.
Chinese original | Novels and autobiographical novels
City of Memories
Yuan Ling
Flower City Press
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | He Ping (Professor, Nanjing Normal University)
The fame of non-fiction writers obscures the fact that Yuan Ling is an excellent novelist. City of Memories is an adventure and exploration between fiction and non-fiction. In fact, there is no shortage of experienced writers in our time, but there is still not enough experienced and responsible backbone. Yuan Ling's writing has precisely this power to bear this literary responsibility. He knows how to write about the countryside and the city, especially the various environments that have been related to his life.
In the current wave of urbanization, ordinary characters are the epitome of a real life, the stage and era background of "City of Memory" are far away, and those stories are not too bizarre, perhaps they are all around us, very real, real to the point of habituation, and gradually forgotten over time. Fortunately, they waited to dig the eyes of the story, Yuan Ling used a penetrating aesthetic to tell the story that belonged to that city and that era, there was no thrilling plot, nor did it make up the suspense, because this was not writing a legend, but a memory of "Fish City", a few lives floating and sinking in "Fish City", nothing more.
Chinese original | A collection of novels
"Ringing"
Tian Ear
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
February 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Zhou Limin (Scholar, Executive Deputy Director of Ba Jin's Former Residence)
"Ringing Spirits" is Tian Er's novella collection, which contains three novels describing people and events in Xiangxi, namely "Breaking the Moon and Smashing People", "Records of People", and "Ringing Spirits". From the experience of the beggar outside, the encounter after returning to his hometown, to the taste of life of the old bandit leader, to the story of the hunter and the little leopard... The author writes about the legend between the mountains and the wilderness, and it is also the norm in human nature, love and hate, and the darkness of the heart, which slowly unfolds under the author's meticulous and long brushstrokes. Perhaps it takes a little patience to appreciate the author's painstaking heart and taste of these legends, perhaps the sweetness of the city, the roughness of the countryside is more attractive and spiritual; however, behind the various appearances, the exploration of the depth of the human heart is the focus of the work. Xiangxi already has a strong literary tradition composed of shen congwen and Huang Yongyu's works, and reading Tian Er's book, I still feel that Shen Congwen is a huge mountain, and it is not easy to get out of it.
Chinese original | Novel
"Chinese Peach and Plum"
Liang Xiaosheng
Writers Press
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Pan Kaixiong (Critic, Senior Media Person)
The "heat wave" of the era drama "In the World" has not passed, Liang Xiaosheng's long new work "Chinese Tao Li" will focus on the small incision of "post-80s" college students, and he who takes college teaching as a profession is fully qualified to tell the ideals and struggles, bitterness and confusion of this generation of college students, and explore their growth and career achievements. Most of them are faced with whether to stay in their hometown or choose to enter the metropolis to work? Many challenges of career and the squeeze of high prices and high house prices in life... This is a long masterpiece that faces reality and is full of humanistic feelings. Do not avoid the problems in life, but also strive to find a way out in the struggle. It shows the author's continued thinking on many social and cultural issues, as well as the understanding and concern of contemporary youth in how to choose between ideals and reality.
Chinese original | A collection of novels
Mirror of the Sky
Chen He
People's Literature Publishing House
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Xu Chenliang (Executive Editor of Contemporary Magazine)
In the past two decades or so, newly immigrated writers who have gone to foreign countries since the reform and opening up have repeatedly brought shocks and surprises to the domestic literary scene, so they have been described as the "overseas army" of China's literary circles. In fact, in recent years, their creations have long overflowed the two modes of writing immigrant experiences and cultural shocks, looking back at their homeland from afar, and began to explore a more personal path.
As an outstanding representative of newly immigrated writers, Chen He's works show us how far this road has gone. The novel collection "Mirror of the Sky" includes his short and medium novels published in Contemporary, Harvest and other journals, continuing the excavation of war, revolution and transnational experience in works such as "Sarawak War", "Miro Camp", "Yiwu Hill" and so on, shuttling between China and Canada, Bolivia and Albania, writing new experiences and universal spiritual puzzles in the era of globalization.
In the title "Mirror of the Sky", in order to confirm the identity of Che Guevara's suspected Chinese comrade-in-arms "Chino", the protagonist retraces the path of guerrillas in Che Guevara's "Bolivian Diary", an incredible journey like a dream, in a narrative of fiction and non-fiction, and the journey of The Chinese trafficked to the Americas in the 19th century, the journey of the descendants of Chinese workers in the 20th century to become revolutionaries, and the journey of Chinese workers and Chinese businessmen to re-embark on the New World in the 21st century, overlapping with each other. It also provides a new paradigm for writing about the experience of China and the world intertwined.
Translate | Novel
The Spirit of Science Fiction
[Chile] by Roberto Polanio
Translated by Hou Jian
Century Wenjing Shanghai People's Publishing House
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Xia Lie (Professor, Hangzhou Normal University)
"Science Fiction Spirit" is Bolaño's early work, but it is full of elements and atmosphere of the following "Wilderness Detective" and "Distant Stars" books, and is considered to be "Bolaño's cosmic base". This is not science fiction, but in the name of science fiction (writing a letter to a science fiction writer), it structures the lyricism and delirium, passion and sloppiness, poetry and crisis of young people.
The novel features 21-year-old Remo and 17-year-old Jan Shrella as the protagonists, and the three corners and clues of "Remo Narration", "Jan's Letter" and "Interview" echo each other, and the stories of different time and space are like jumping notes, intertwined into a rhythmic symphony. In this unconventional narrative structure, the author weaves the wanton absurdity of youth and the romanticism of rout and rebellion.
This book may be an early work of Bolaño, not as mature as "Absurd Detective", and even less magnificent than "2666", but it is very literary to reproduce a scene of the author's Mexican life, and Remo and Jan can therefore be regarded as Two old doppelgangers of Bolaño - this fictional and real relationship will give Bolaño fans a double happiness.
Translate | Novel
Sabas Theatre
By Philip Ross
Translated by Zhang Tingquan and Zhang Yan
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Wang Chunlin (Professor of Shanxi University, Editor-in-Chief of Novel Review)
The owner of the Sabas Theatre, Mitch Sabas, had previously worked as a puppet performer, and when the story of the novel began, the 64-year-old had given up his career due to poor health, but he was temporarily caught up in a sexual scandal. But please note that the so-called "seeking benevolence" and the entanglement of sexual scandals highlight his certain deviance, and many times, he is rebelling against the mediocre daily life in the form of sex. Although such a novel is certainly inseparable from the description of sex, the sex at the end of Rose's pen is not obscene at all, and it will not look dirty. It is probably because of this that James Wood makes this assessment: "In The Sabas Theatre, sex has at least a kind of private inhibition, a metaphysical dignity." Yes, there is even a solemnity, for it is filled with philosophical despair. "Sabas used sex to wage his war of nihilism against decency and sobriety."
Translate | Novel
The Black Forest and the White Rose
[Ireland] by Owen Dempsey
Translated by Li Jingyi
Light Dust Beijing United Publishing Company
March 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Xiao Jinghong (Vice President of the Network Literature Research Institute of the China Writers Association)
Born in Ireland, Owen Dempsey is widely popular with readers around the world for his wonderful stories. "The Black Forest and the White Rose" is particularly representative. Under Nazi rule, Franka, a nurse who had lost all her loved ones, was in despair when she found the wounded German pilot John. The two saved themselves from each other and rewrote the fates of many more. "White Rose" blooms in the "Black Forest", the novel in a simple and clear plot, in the mood of song and crying, in the moving romance, in the gripping emotions, people feel the warmth in the cold winter, as well as the meaning of survival.
In April, the Chinese and foreign novels were the top 3 in the popularity list
1
"Casting Swords"
Wu Heping
People's Literature Publishing House
March 2022
2
"The Ship at Sea"
Yu Yishuang
Beijing Times Chinese Literature Bureau
April 2022
3
"The Fish is on Land"
Xu Chang
Flower City Press
March 2022
Duty Editor | Peter Pan
Duty Editor-in-Chief | Deng Siyi
The 2022 Good Book Selection Is in The Call!
Select book types
Books are mainly aimed at public readers, and are divided into three categories: Chinese and foreign genre novels, Chinese and foreign novels, and Chinese and foreign humanities and social sciences.
1. Chinese and foreign genre novels
Long genre novel + short story collection
2. Chinese and foreign novels
Novels + short story collections
3. Chinese and foreign humanities and social sciences
Thought, History, Popular Science, New Knowledge, Art, Culture, Nonfiction Writing and Features, Biographies, Essays, Essays
Publisher's Recommendation Standards
Books published between January and December 2022 (except January, supplemented by good books from December and November of the previous year)
Chinese mainland published
Reprints and reprints are not included
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Zhang Ying
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