The April 3rd Incident
Stories
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From one of China’s most famous contemporary writers, who celebrated novel To Live catapulted him to international fame, here is a stunning collection of stories, selected from the best of Yu Hua’s early work, that shows his far-reaching influence on a pivotal period in Chinese literature.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Yu Hua and other young Chinese writers began to reimagine their national literature. Departing from conventional realism in favor of a more surreal and subjective approach inspired by Kafka, Faulkner, and Borges, the boundary-pushing fiction of this period reflected the momentous cultural changes sweeping the world’s most populous nation.
The stories collected here show Yu Hua masterfully guiding us from one fractured reality to another. “A History of Two People” traces the paths of a man and a woman who dream in parallel throughout their lives. “In Memory of Miss Willow Yang” weaves a spellbinding web of signs and symbols. “As the North Wind Howled” carries a case of mistaken identity to absurd and hilarious conclusions. And the title story follows an unforgettable narrator determined to unearth a conspiracy against him that may not exist. By turns daring, darkly comic, thought-provoking, and profound, The April 3rd Incident is an extraordinary record of a singular moment in Chinese letters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This accomplished, genre-bending collection from Yu (The Seventh Day) is full of mistaken identities, karmic retribution, and an increasingly paranoid state of existence. Collected from work written by the author in the 1980s and '90s, the stories are formally experimental, indicative of a burgeoning period in Chinese literature and society. In the title story, Yu takes the reader on a Calvino-esque journey of time loops, characters who are not as they are purported to be, and conspiracy theories, as the protagonist grows suspicious that his friends and family around him are in on a long con that will come to a head on April 3rd. Yu's devastating wit and morbid humor are on full display in his shorter works, such as "Death Chronicle," in which a truck driver who was involved in a tragic hit-and-run accident over 10 years ago finds himself in a similar situation; in an attempt to do the right thing, his intentions are instead seen as malicious. In "A History of Two People," Yu traces the lifetimes of two characters who, though separated by socioeconomic status, dream the same dream. Alternatively bizarre, surreal, humorous, and unexpectedly poignant, Yu's collection will satisfy fans and readers new to his writing alike.
