Additional Book Information
Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681375748
Pages: 400
Publication Date: August 9, 2022
Time TunnelStories and Essays
by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang
An NYRB Classics Original
This new collection of work by the great Eileen Chang includes previously untranslated stories and essays from throughout her career, starting with her glamorous debut in 1940s Shanghai and continuing through the trials of her Cold War migration to Hong Kong and the U.S. East Coast and her last years as a bus-riding flâneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles. “Classmates Then All Successful Now,” one of Chang's finest stories, reprises the whole journey through multiple, sometimes nested time frames, while in “Flowers Adrift, Blossoms Afloat,” a young woman peers into the darkness of a covered bridge that crosses between her Chinese homeland and British Hong Kong and sees a "time travel tunnel"—a fitting image too for this collection's half-century stretch of exquisite mindscapes from a world-class author.Praise
Before Joan Didion, there was Eileen Chang. A slender, dramatic woman with a taste for livid details and feverish colors, Chang combined Didion's glamor and sensibility with the terrific wit of Evelyn Waugh. She could, with a single phrase, take you hostage.
—Jamie Fisher, The Millions
Her writing . . . is cinematically crisp, and phantasmagorical. . . . She had the lunatic sensibilities of Marc Chagall, married to a Henri Matisse-like elegance.
—Ilaria Maria Sala, The Wall Street Journal
China's Virginia Woolf.
—The Wall Street Journal
As Chang is gaining a growing number of readers in different languages, her work is being positioned where it always belonged, next to other world classics.
—Robert McG. Thomas, The New York Times