“…this is Kuo's masterpiece,
as innovative and intelligent as any writing you can find.”
—ROBERT H. ABEL,
painter and writer, Riding a Tiger, The Progress of a Fire
as innovative and intelligent as any writing you can find.”
—ROBERT H. ABEL,
painter and writer, Riding a Tiger, The Progress of a Fire
|
redbat books is proud to introduce the new novel by
American Book Award Winner, Alex Kuo as the next book in our Pacific Northwest Writers Series, shanghai.shanghai.shanghaiA Novel by Alex Kuo
shanghai.shanghai.shanghai is a novel about the culture writer and closet novelist Ge and his encounters with such people as a Bogota pickpocket, a defiant Uighur woman with borrowed baby, a German naval attaché, American evangelicals working the Beijing Olympics, and China’s first woman conductor of western classical music. Its main themes play with the thin fabric that separates state-censorship and self-censorship, and collaboration and corroboration in China’s war of infinite resistance.
It avoids conventional narrative techniques; instead it focuses on episodic and interconnected moments revolving in a Shanghai between its foreign-occupied 1939, state-occupied 1989, and the self-occupied present in a Möbius loop, sometimes in the same sentence, and uses backstory sidebars and multiple English and Chinese typefaces to maintain a fluid and cohesive story.    About the Author
Alex Kuo was born in Boston and lived his early childhood for most of the Second World War in the French Concession of occupied Shanghai. He is married to the writer Joan Burbick, and has lived and worked in the Pacific Northwest for most of his adult life, with extensive teaching appointments in Beijing, Changchun and Hong Kong. He was awarded a United Nations research grant for his last novel The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze partly set at China’s Three Gorges Dam.
Since an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1963, he has published more than 350 poems, stories, photographs, essays and extended interviews in magazines, newspapers and anthologies, as well as twelve other books. Among his many honors, he has received three National Endowment for the Arts awards, Fulbright and Lingnan Professorships, a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio residency, Knox College’s Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award, and the American Book Award in 2002 for his Lipstick and Other Stories. www.alexkuo.org |
PRAISE FOR shanghai.shanghai.shanghai
“In shanghai.shanghai.shanghai, the protagonist Ge writes a story titled ‘Cultural Exchange’ in which he observes Bad memory, this is not China today. Indeed, it is China today that is on Alex Kuo’s mind in his brilliant and defiant new novel. Kuo has created a challenging form, the metafictional history-novel-memoir, or MFHNM2, a masterpiece of irony, the trompe d’oeil, a book supposedly “translated” by the author. In elastic time, history is the page turner, alongside Ge’s quirkily profound observations on music, Chinese cuisine, literature and even fashion. An eternal bridge game is the resolution. The city of Shanghai encapsulates the heartbreakingly muddled history of modern China that dominates the political landscape of the 21st century.”
—XU XI, editor and writer, Habit of a Foreign Sky, Hong Kong Rose
“Bouncing between 1939, 1989 and 2010 in Shanghai, Alex Kuo wisely and mischievously weaves the crazy inconsistencies, tragedies and coincidences of globalization into a dazzling narrative that thrills, enlightens, and humanizes us. One of our most gifted and audacious storytellers, who fuses Gone with the Wind, American missionaries in China, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics to both celebrate and expose the cultural mishaps and hypocrisies of our modern world.”
—AIMEE PHAN, columnist and writer, The Reeducation of Cherry Truong, We Should Never Meet
“Mr. Rushdie, Mr. Murakami, let me introduce you to Alex Kuo whose novel shanghai.shanghai.shanghai moves effortlessly between China in 1939, 1989, and now. The narrator, Ge, talks to his characters and people from the past as the author crafts a course between fiction and non-fiction to find the truth about China’s (and America’s) modern histories. There is Lu Xun anger here at history’s follies, but also unsparing satire and outrageous humor. A dazzling read, a must for Sinophiles and anyone interested in how we get our truths about China yesterday and today. After eleven previous books, this is Kuo’s masterpiece, as innovative and intelligent as any writing you can find.”
—ROBERT H. ABEL, painter and writer, Riding a Tiger, The Progress of a Fire
“An inimitable blend of fiction, cultural satire and political romance. Imagine taking a stroll through the streets of modern day Shanghai while wearing a monocle that transmits images from a historical Shanghai, where the international settlement held on to the last gasp of its 100-year history. Kuo’s most self-assured manifesto of creative autonomy to date, this book takes you around Shanghai and the Chinese mind as no other tour guide could. It’s a book that I’ll turn to again.”
—WEN JIN, Shanghai scholar and critic, Pluralist Univeralism
“Alex Kuo’s shanghai.shanghai.shanghai is a tour de force that moves seamlessly through time and space, revealing different layers of the palimpsest that is the grand metropolis of Shanghai—all told from the point of view of a journalist named Ge, who lives and writes simultaneously in present day freewheeling Shanghai and in the city during its wartime occupation by Japan. Kuo’s novel is a poet’s fever dream and stream of consciousness rumination on the eponymous city, East and West, colonialism, Hollywood, June 4th, the corruption of the nationalist government, and the vicissitudes of life in China today—in all their multivalent complexity and absurdity.”
—ANDREA LINGENFELTER, poet and translator, Candy, Farewell My Concubine
“At a time when most of us are racing to reduce our world to facile, 140-character tweets, Alex Kuo has succeeded once again in doing the opposite: creating a novel that celebrates complexity and challenges our most cherished assumptions about culture, history, politics and even writing itself. shanghai.shanghai.shanghai is not easy reading, but it is also difficult to put aside, a book filled with passages and personages that play over and over in the mind long after the final page.”
—PAULINE CHEN, medical columnist and writer,
“In shanghai. shanghai.shanghai Alex Kuo, who lived there as a child, explores and illuminates seventy years of Shanghai’s chequered and fascinating history. He does so through the eyes of Ge, a journalist who casts a sceptical and sometimes withering eye over historical and imaginary figures in a Moebius loop of time that mingles past with present and fact with fiction, often in the same pungent sentence. Casting the conventional narrative form aside, Kuo creates a glittering display of moments back and forth in time that are held together by Ge and his unwavering ability to detect human frailty and fraud whether in foreigners or Chinese. A scintillating achievement.”
—CHRISTOPHER NEW, philosopher and novelist, Shanghai, A Change of Flag
