Shanghai Dancing by Brian Castro
After 40 years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," António seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, António heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. The Age has described the book as "an extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene... told in Castro's characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay." The winner of some of Australia's top literary prizes, Shanghai Dancing has been praised by its judges as "a work of major significance [that] challenges our expectations of storytelling... It is impressive as history, as fiction, as a book which stretches the literary form and which speaks to the universality of the human experience." Shanghai Dancing marks the U.S. debut of a major Australian literary figure.
Brian Castro is one of Australia's most celebrated writers. Acknowledged for his prose style and brilliant use of language, Castro's work has received wide critical acclaim and won major Australian literary prizes. Three of his works have been awarded the Victorian Premier's Literary Award. In 2014, Castro was given the Patrick White Award for Literature for his contribution to Australian Literature.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781885030429 |
| ISBN 10 | 1885030428 |
| Title | Shanghai Dancing |
| Author | Brian Castro |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Kaya Press |
| Year published | 2009-06-11 |
| Number of pages | 468 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |