A collection of tales rooted in Chinese folk traditions and contemporary issues includes the stories of a family's victimization by hostile townspeople and elements from their new seaside home, the imaginative walking journeys of a pair of friends, and an elderly man's life in a cloud-covered wooden building where he is served pancakes by a hostile youth. Original.

Product Description: The thirteen stories of Dialogues in Paradise are eloquent in a way the West associates with both the modern and the ancient: the dark oracles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the paranoid mystery of Kafka, the moving stream of Woolf. The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible...read more