The beggar lama

The Beggar Lama is the story of the Gyalrong Kuzhap, a Tibetan Buddhist polymath and reincarnated lama who has led a remarkable life through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century.

The columbia companion to modern chinese literature

The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature features more than fifty short essays on specific writers and literary trends from the Qing period (1895–1911) to the present. Both a teaching tool and a go-to research companion, this volume is a one-of-a-kind resource for mastering modern lite...

Joy, despair, illusion, dreams

Joy, Despair, Illusion, Dreams presents a selection of Nō plays, magnificently rendered in English by Royall Tyler, an eminent scholar and translator of classical Japanese literature.

Wondrous brutal fictions

Wondrous Brutal Fictions presents eight seminal works from the seventeenth-century Japanese sekkyō and ko-jōruri puppet theaters, many translated into English for the first time.

Top graduate zhang xie

Top Graduate Zhang Xie is the first extant play in the Chinese southern dramatic tradition and a milestone in the history of Chinese literature. Dating from the early fifteenth century, but possibly composed earlier, it relates the story of a talented scholar who sets off for the capital to take ...

Performing the socialist state

Xiaomei Chen offers a new account of the origins, evolution, and legacies of key trends in twentieth-century Chinese theater. Instead of seeing the Republican, high socialist, and postsocialist periods as radically distinct, she identifies key continuities in theatrical practices and shared aspir...

How to read chinese drama

This book is a comprehensive and inviting introduction to the literary forms and cultural significance of Chinese drama as both text and performance. Each chapter offers an accessible overview and critical analysis of one or more plays—canonical as well as less frequently studied works—and their ...

Sugawara and the secrets of calligraphy

A complete translation of a major Japanese puppet drama written in 1746, with an investigation into the play's many authors and the use of bunraku puppets.

Staging personhood

Staging Personhood uncovers a hidden history of the Ming-Qing transition by exploring what it meant for the clothing of a deposed dynasty to survive onstage. Reading dramatic texts and performances against Qing sartorial regulations, Guojun Wang offers an interdisciplinary lens on the entanglemen...

A topsy-turvy world

A Topsy-Turvy World presents English translations of shorter late Ming and early Qing plays. Satirical and often earthy, these mostly one-act plays provide a glimpse of Chinese daily life and mores even as they question or subvert the boundaries of social, moral, and political order.

Portraits in white

Kaori Lai’s Portraits in White explores everyday life in Taiwan under the White Terror, illuminating how the violence of martial law pervades even the most mundane moments.

Fu ping

Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary China’s most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban l...

The resurrected skeleton

The first book in English to trace the resurrected skeleton, this text translates major adaptations while drawing parallels to Jesus’s encounter with a skull and the European tradition of the Dance of Death.

Luxuriant gems of the spring and autumn

A major resource expanding the study of early Chinese philosophy, religion, literature, and politics, the first complete English-language translation of the Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu fanlu), one of the key texts of early Confucianism

The drunkard

The Drunkard is one of the first full-length stream-of-consciousness novels written in Chinese. As the unnamed narrator, a writer at odds with a philistine world, sinks to his drunken nadir, his plight can be seen to represent that of a whole intelligentsia, a whole culture, degraded by the bruta...

The columbia sourcebook of literary taiwan

Contains more than 160 documents and writings that reflect the development of Taiwanese literature from the early modern period to the twenty-first century

Between two shores

This is a story that begins in California and ends in China—a detective tale with a subtle love interest. After a Chinese American man dies in mysterious circumstances near Hangzhou, his wife, an Irish American, goes to China to find out what really happened.

Wandering from china to america

This autobiography offers a tale of the joys and hardships of simple living in Chinese and American societies.

Wittgenstein, a one-way ticket, and other unforeseen benefits of studying chinese

This is a collection of essays by some of the world’s most renowned China experts, who share recollections of their time in China and reflect on what learning Chinese has meant to them. They share how Chinese has removed barriers, built rapport, opened doors, and led them down entirely unexpected...

Keywords in chinese culture

Like every culture, Chinese has its set of keywords: pivotal terms of political, ethical, literary, and philosophical discourse. This volume analyzes some of these keywords from different disciplinary and temporal perspectives, offering a new integrative study of their semantic richness, developm...

The matchmaker, the apprentice, and the football fan

The Matchmaker, the Apprentice, and the Football Fan moves between anarchic campuses, maddening communist factories, and the victims of China's economic miracle to showcase the absurdity, injustice, and socialist Gothic of everyday Chinese life. In "The Football Fan," readers fall in with an intr...

Three plays by kobo abe

The columbia anthology of chinese folk and popular literature

In The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, two of the world's leading sinologists, Victor H. Mair and Mark Bender, capture the breadth of China's oral-based literary heritage. This collection presents works drawn from the large body of oral literature of many of China's rec...

The columbia anthology of traditional chinese literature

The best china

This anthology of essays from Hong Kong and the diaspora, ranging across the past hundred and seventy years, presents the Chinese tradition of free-thinking discursive prose. It records the intellectual ferment that has characterized the city since its founding, buoyed by an all-pervasive and ind...

Radical

Xiaolu Guo has been lauded as a “voice . . . speaking with full freedom” (Wall Street Journal), which has made her one of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation. She is the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Nine Continents and a Granta Best Young British Nove...

End credits

What happens when you land your dream job and everything you've been working toward becomes a complete nightmare? This is Patty Lin's story. She climbed the ladder as an award-winning television writer (often the only Asian person in the room) only to be confronted by discouragement, burnout, and...

The chinese tragedy of king lear

A compelling new reading of The Tragedy of King Lear that finds parallels in twentieth-century Chinese historyAt the start of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ professions of love, but portions it out before hearing all of their answers...

Vietnam: the (last) war the u.s. lost

As the connection between Vietnam and Iraq grows more urgent, lessons for today's antiwar movement.

The mandate of heaven

The essential Marxist history of China under Mao.

China in global capitalism

As the rivalry between the US and China enters a dangerous new phase, reaffirming the politics of anti-imperialism is a task more important than ever. From trade wars and pandemic politics to rioting workers, intercontinental balloons, and battles over TikTok, the US media tends to present contem...

The afterlife is letting go

Shortlisted for the 2026 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, Nonfiction!Chosen one of Booklist's Top Ten History Books of the Year!Winner of the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction"The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration du...

Inside major east asian library collections in north america, volume 2

Volume 2 of Inside Major East Asian Library Collections in North America presents an extensive collection of interviews that give key insights into Chinese, Korean, and Asian American librarianship

Inside major east asian library collections in north america, volume 1

Volume 1 of Inside Major East Asian Library Collections in North America presents an extensive collection of interviews that give key insights into Japanese and Korean librarianship.

China’s peaceful rise

Adopting a constructivist approach, this book argues that China's prospects for achieving 'great power' status peacefully depend more on perceptions of the country's development than on concrete measures of power or economic benefits. Incorporating historical perceptions, survey data and general ...

Hong kong and british culture, 1945–97

A major contribution to the scholarship on British decolonisation, the cultural history of imperialism and British engagement with China. This highly original study places the emergence of contemporary Hong Kong in the wider, post-imperial setting.

World of wonders

“Hands-down one of the most beautiful books of the year.” —NPRA New York Times BestsellerBarnes & Noble Book of the YearBeloved author Aimee Nezhukumatathil's celebrated work of nonfiction, now including additional essays and illustrations. As a child, Nezhukumatathil called many places home:...

Making it count

A history of how Chinese officials used statistics to define a new society in the early years of the People’s Republic of China In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People’s Republic of China was how much they did not know. The gove...

Bird talk and other stories by xu xu

Introducing the works of a major Chinese writer--liberal, cosmopolitan, and lyrically exotic--once banned but now embraced, and newly "discovered" in the West.