One sound is emitted, and more sounds will resonate with the echoes| new book recommendations of the week

Reporter | Xu Luqing

Edit | Yellow Moon

1 "Zebra"

Fu Zhen

People's Literature Publishing House 2022-1

Zebra is a novel based in part on the author Fu Zhen's true experiences. In the past two years, she has experienced three pregnancy and fetal arrests, undergone four uterine evacuation surgeries, and her life is surrounded by fear and anxiety. A year after giving birth, she felt that there were still too many fragments in this life shock and realized that she had to write them down.

The story in the book is about the adventure and reunion of the heroine Suang on the road alone to Thailand to seek fertility medical treatment. When Fu Zhen was creating Zebra, his father sent Kenzaburo Oe's writing principles- "I am the only one who escapes and comes to report to you." She also hopes that her novels will be reported to the world, "to the world, to refute those who take things for granted, to define women at will, and to tell everyone that there is another side to the stories in the shadows." She believes that "telepathy" is also a way to establish a connection with people, and when individual experiences merge into the wider world, private suffering becomes more visible pain, and when a voice is heard, more sounds will resonate and reverberate.

Literature Class

[Argentina] Julio Cortázar by Lin Yeqing, translated

Nanhai Publishing Company | New Classics 2022-2

In the 1960s and 1970s, Latin America saw the emergence of a large number of experimental and imaginative literary works, a phenomenon that was later called the "Latin American literary explosion", challenging the literary tradition that had long been monopolized by France, Britain and the United States. Cortázar is one of the representative writers of the "literary explosion", and Oviedo, the author of the History of American Literature in the Spanish language, once commented: "Whenever cortázar's name is thought of, the first word that comes to people's minds is: charming. ”

In 1980, Cortázar was invited to teach literature classes at the University of California, Berkeley, and the book "Literature Lessons" was transcribed from recordings of eight classes and two lectures over two months. Cortázar's classes do not talk about theoretical terms, emphasizing: "I am not a planner, I am neither a critic nor a theorist..." He tried to put his writing into the overall framework of Latin American literature, sharing how he had moved from believing in literature itself to using literature as a way of participating in the course of his country's history. In fact, Cortázar's writing has always been inseparable from Latin American politics, he created "Nicaragua, Sweet Violence" based on the Nicaragua Revolution, and donated all the money; "Manuel" won the Medici Prize, he chose to donate copyright to help Argentine political prisoners; in the last decade of his life, he devoted a lot of energy to the study of the political situation in Latin America.

Kafka's Biography: The Critical Years: 1910-1915

[de] Reiner Stacher by Huang Xueyuan translated by Cheng Weiping

Guangxi Normal University Press| Shanghai Bebet 2022-4

Prague Jews, insurance bureau civil servants and writer Franz Kafka lived forty years and eleven months before dying of laryngeal tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna. His life had nothing to do with worldly success: at the age of thirty he lived with his parents; his circle of friends was small and had hardly changed; and in the First World War his property was destroyed by disease and inflation. In his love life, Kafka was engaged three times in his life and never married, and in a letter to his girlfriend, he listed Dostoevsky, Grylpatsy, Kleist, and Flaubert as his "true blood relatives" — all three of whom were bachelors except Dostoevsky — to explain his extremely contradictory and wavering psychology of marriage.

Kafka's Biography: The Critical Years focuses on Kafka's life in his nearly thirty years from 1910 to 1915. During this period, Kafka became a civil servant, dissolved his marriage a few weeks before the outbreak of the war, and also wrote works such as "Judgment", "Metamorphosis", "Missing Person", "Litigation" and so on, which were the key years of Kafka's life's creation and life. 2022 is the centenary of the birth of Kafka's "Castle", and his writing transcends time and points prophetically to the present: under the seemingly neutral bureaucracy that actually promotes evil, individual life is deprived, people become numbers and cases, and endless offices see no end, everything is just like K's judgment of the villagers: "You people here are born with a sincere and fearful attitude towards the government, and after birth, some people continue to instill this reverence in you from all directions for a lifetime. You yourself have done your best to cooperate with others instilling in you. ”

Journeys of the Gods: Travel writing in Early Medieval China and nineteenth-century China

Tian Xiaofei

Life, Reading, And New Knowledge Triptych Bookstore 2022-5

The Southern and Northern Dynasties and the 19th century were two periods of frequent exchanges with the outside world in Chinese history. According to Tian Xiaofei, a professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University's Department of East Asian Studies, these were two important "dislocation" periods in Chinese history. In these two eras, territories and boundaries were crossed, a large number of foreign cultures were translated into China, and Chinese also traveled far and wide, across overseas. In the writing of the literati of this period, travel is a recurring theme, and the exotic impact and the confirmation of self-identity are condensed in these traveling texts, and in her view, viewing the new world and reproducing this view is the common point of Chinese travel literature in the Middle And nineteenth centuries.

Tian Xiaofei is not only a literary researcher, but also a writer and poet, she was admitted to the English Department of Peking University at the age of thirteen, discussed poetry with the poet Haizi, and later went to the United States to study Chinese literature. For historical research, she believes: "We need a strong historical imagination, not a imaginary imagination like a novelist, but the ability to recognize and perceive a world that is completely different from our time, a world completely different from our world." Including this book, Tian Xiaofei's four monographs on medieval literature written from 2000 to 2016 were published together, presenting her holistic vision of the literature and culture of the Wei and Jin dynasties.

The Art of Association: A Collection of Literati Societies in east Asia from the 16th to the 18th Centuries

Zhang Yixi Editor-in-Chief

Guangxi Normal University Press| University Q 2022-4

Dong Qichang, a famous calligrapher and painter at the end of the Ming Dynasty, had formed a society with Zhang Xiao and others when he was young, and Dong Qichang's "Preface to the Tao Bai Zhai Manuscript" said: "Yu Xiang and Feng Xianfu's generation of associations in the Zhai Zhong, the morning collection of the sutra and the art of life, each wearing a reward, that is, the bonfire lamp limit rhymes, and the people give several chapters of poetry. "Literati associations reached their highest value in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, and the collection of society not only demonstrated the flow of scholars, but also influenced the Chinese character cultural circle in the East Asian world.

The Art of Association is a collection of essays that took three years to write and compile. When the editor, Zhang Yixi, a professor in the Department of Humanities and Sociology at Yangming Jiaotong University, first came up with this idea, scholars from all over the world went to Taiwan to discuss it, and the interdisciplinary and multifaceted thinking and writing of scholars in different fields of literature and history were finally assembled into a book. In the past, the study of literati society collections tended to focus on Jiangnan in the late Ming Dynasty, and the research objects of this book spanned all regions of China and also extended to Japan and Vietnam. In addition, the articles in the collection are not limited to the theme of the collection, but are from the perspective of politics, family, regionality, urban life, cultural transformation, etc., such as the connection between the collection and the local family, the relationship between the collection and the urban space, as well as the relationship between the collection and the poetry school, the eight strands of literature, and the trend of classics.

"Mountaineering Story"

Guo Jing

Beijing United Publishing Company | Lefu Culture 2022-3

In January 1991, the Sino-Japanese joint expedition encountered an avalanche on the way to climb the Meili Snow Mountain, killing all 17 people, and the "Meili Mountain Disaster" is the second largest mountain disaster in the world so far.

In the 2021 issue of "Meili Snow Mountain: Looking for Seventeen Friends", author Naori Kobayashi focuses on the experience of searching for the remains of seventeen friends, and after the mountain disaster, local Tibetans were indifferent and hostile to the Japanese team members who tried to retrieve the bodies of the victims, and were reluctant to touch these bodies, which triggered the confusion and anger of the Japanese mountaineers. In contrast, Guo Jing's "Mountaineering Story" focuses on a different perspective, the author investigates the historical reasons why the Japanese side chose to climb Meili, and the impact of the mountain disaster on local mountain people, the families of the victims, and even the snow mountain itself, the mountaineering community, etc. Guo Jing pointed out that another name for Meili Snow Mountain is "Kawagebo", and in the local Tibetan conception, Kawagebo is sacred and should not be climbed, and if you do not understand the significance of Kawagebo in the hearts of local Tibetans, you cannot understand why the local villagers have such an attitude. From the perspective of mountain survivors, families of victims, and local mountain people, the author travels between different worlds, trying to understand the different worldviews of people living in different cultural contexts.

"Our Band Can Be Your Life Too"

[American] michael Azerrad by Dong Nan translation

Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore | Yazhong Culture 2022-3

On September 24, 1991, a band called Nirvana released Nevermind, knocking Michael Jackson off the Top of the Billboard Albums chart. This is seen by many musicians as a victory for American independent music, and in an era when a large entertainment group monopolized the music market, these independent bands that continued to tour underground rock clubs finally broke through the siege and entered the vision of many fans.

It's no coincidence that "Our Band Can Be Your Life" chronicles the glory days of the American independent music movement that coincided perfectly with the Reagan-Bush era. As drummer Peter Prescott says, "The '80s were a bit like the '50s — in a way, it was a conservative era, money-conscious, politically dirty, and republican." At the same time, the philosophy of most indie bands is that rock 'n' roll is an inherent part of the soul of young people, an engine of social change, not just a consumer commodity. The book chronicles the American independent music movement from 1981 to 1991, and contains the stories of thirteen bands who refused to use the assembly line manufacturing methods of large corporations to maintain their own musical style to the greatest extent possible, changing the picture of American music and influencing the way of life of generations, as the band Minutemen sang, "Our band could be your life" (Our band could be your life).

The Legend of the Brain

Matthew Cobb by Zhang Jin, translated

CITIC Publishing Group | Xinsi Culture 2022-3

For thousands of years, thinkers and scientists have tried to understand the role of the brain. However, despite the astonishing discoveries of science, we still have only the most obscure concept of how the brain works. In A Biography of the Brain, Matthew Cobb, a neuroscientist and science writer at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, traces how our imagination of the brain has been shaped by the most important technologies of every era. Today we might think of the brain as a supercomputer, but in the past it was also likened to a telegraph, a telephone exchange, or some kind of hydraulic system. Tomorrow, when new technologies emerge, what do we think the brain looks like?

This book is a complete history of Chinese Simplified popular brain science. For thousands of years, human exploration of the brain has never stopped, from the "mind-centered view" to the "brain-centered view", from the mind from the heart to the brain as a machine, from the brain as an invariant system to a plastic network, "Brain Biography" tells how scientists discovered the working mechanism of the brain, counted the process of human understanding of the brain, and the impact of brain science on computers and artificial intelligence.