Paper Republic promotes Chinese literature in English translation. It focusses on new writing from contemporary Chinese writers.
Balanced between the Western new year and the Chinese New Year of the Pig, Paper Republic has just launched its 2018 roll call of published English translations from Chinese. With 33 novels, six poetry collections and three young adult or children’s titles, it’s a unique resource you won’t find anywhere else on the web.
The roll call includes titles from established authors such as:
Yan Lianke, whose The Day the Sun Died keeps up Yan’s relentless exploration of China’s nightmare underbelly;
Su Tong, whose Petulia’s Rouge Tin, written in the early 1990s, is a spare portrait of the collapse of “old China” after the communist revolution;
Yu Hua’s, whose collection The April 3rd Incident, brings together some of the most iconic stories of his career.
New voices represented include:
Su Wei, whose Hidden Valley is a dream-like tale from the edges of Chinese civilization;
95-year-old Rao Pingru, whose Our Story, is the illustrated tale of a life-long romance.
Genre fiction is not forgotten. Jin Yong’s epic martial arts fiction is included, as is sci-fi. Thrillers get a look-in too with Zhou Haohui’s Death Notice.
There are translations of ethnic minority writers, including Xue Mo, with stories of Xinjiang, and the Uyghur, Asem Alat.
There’s even a translated poetry collection in the form of a box of cards: Yan Jun’s 100 Poems of 10,000 Elephants.
As to translators, there are five novels from Howard Goldblatt, with settings ranging from the Gobi Desert to Taiwan. Nicky Harman, who translated Our Story, and who writes Asian Books Blog's On translation column, is also more than once represented.
See the full roll call here.
