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Time Tunnel

Time Tunnel

Stories and Essays

by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang

$17.95
$17.95
Asian Literature Available as E-Book Essays & Criticism International Literature Short Stories / Anthologies
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Shortlisted for the 2025 Baifang Schell Book Prize

Time Tunnel offers a new selection of stories and essays, some translated for the first time into English, drawn from every stage of the career of the great Chinese writer Eileen Chang, from her debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai through her flight, following the Revolution, to Hong Kong and America, to her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles.

"Genesis," left out of the two volumes of stories with which Chang made her name in the 1940s, shows her transfixing eye for visual detail and aptitude for brilliant verbal description, even as it looks forward to the improvisatory, open-ended approach to narrative she developed in later years. "Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift" addresses the perils and uncertainties—the vertigo—of exile, while in the late masterpiece "Those Old Schoolmates They're All Quite Classy Now," Chang looks back across the better part of a lifetime to the world she came from and the changes that have come with the years.

Essays like "Return to the Frontier" and "New England Is China," both written in English, broaden our wonder at the effervescent and melancholy genius of a transformative modern writer.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681375748
Pages: 216
Publication Date:

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

Eileen Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature.
—Ang Lee

[Time Tunnel] reaffirms Eileen Chang’s place as one of the 20th century’s finest writers . . . These stories showcase Chang’s enduring ability to illuminate the inner lives of people dislocated by vast historic and cultural shifts. . . We owe a debt of thanks to Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang, not only for translating these remarkable stories into English, but for proving that with Eileen Chang, there are no marginal texts, only hidden gems.
—Megan Walsh, China Books Review

Eileen Chang is twentieth-century China’s supreme writer of bourgeois desolation with an existential edge.
—Karen S. Kingsbury, Electric Literature

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

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