Description: "After leaving the Mainland for Hong Kong in 1952, Eileen Chang was commissioned by the United States Information Service to write two books, one of which was her magnificent novel Naked Earth. Far from being a simplistic exercise in anti-Communist propaganda (two previous novels Chang wrote were pro-Communist), Naked Earth is a powerfully moving, Balzacian tale that follows two young students, Liu Ch'uen and Su Nan, who fall in love at a time when, as Chang writes, "the whole country lay stretched out like an open palm, ready to close around any one person at any minute." Mao's land reform movement is in full force, and Liu and Su Nan are sent to a farm to help the peasants take over the fields. The work is hard, the nights long, and slowly it becomes clear that spies abound. Both Liu and Su Nan harbor festering secrets that are pulling them apart and Liu is eventually imprisoned by his enemies and sent to fight on the Korean front. A romance, a thrilling drama, a tragedy, Naked Earth is a stunning work of twentieth-century fiction by one of China's most revered modern novelists"--
Review Quotes: "An unrelenting portrait of love and loss in Maoist China. . . . Chang develops a tragic wartime romance that leaves readers with a painfully clear picture of just how deeply Mao's reign scarred her native country." --Publishers Weekly
"[A] brutal, powerful look at the cost the Maoist regime exacted on even those who perpetuated it." --Kristine Huntley, Booklist"Chang's novel is a searing portrait of the absurd and frequently brutal elements of life, love, and war in Maoist China." --James Yeh, Vice "There is no doubt about the compassionate quality of the novel, the purity of its language, and the metaphorical richness of its imagery." --C.T. Hsia "The novel shines. . . . It's telling that it ends on a personal note rather than on a political one. Chang's description of small compromises and grand despair are both affecting and compelling." --Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Love in a Fallen City (NYRB Classics) "Chang's powerful, cruel tales are usually without a vestige of tenderness or redemptive faith, but the existential hell in which they unfold is luxuriously furnished and full of sensuous temptations." --The Independent "A major rediscovery." --Kirkus Reviews "She expertly burdens her characters with failed dreams and stifled possibilities, leads them to push aside the heavy curtains of family and convention, and then shows them a yawning emptiness. Their different responses are brilliantly underplayed and fascinating." --Publishers Weekly