Written on Water by Eileen Chang

Written on Water by Eileen Chang

Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature.

Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang's reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.

Eileen Chang, a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, was born into a wealthy Shanghai family in 1920. While the city was under Japanese occupation in 1941, she began to write the stories and essays that cemented her literary renown. She fled China in 1952 to avoid the Communist Party's influence, eventually settling in the United States in 1955. She continued to create novels, short stories, essays, and Hong Kong film screenplays. Her writings became extremely successful in the Chinese-speaking world in the 1970s.

Chang became increasingly reclusive as her celebrity grew, and she was discovered dead in her Los Angeles residence in 1995. Her writings are still being translated into English. Ang Lee directed a cinematic adaptation of her novella Lust, Caution, which was released in 2007.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781681375762
ISBN 10	1681375761
Title	Written on Water
Author	Eileen Chang
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2023-05-02
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.