Crossings Contributor(s): Hua, Chuang (Author), Ling, Amy (Afterword by) |
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ISBN: 0811216683 ISBN-13: 9780811216685 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $13.46 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: June 2007 Annotation: A powerful story of one woman's displacement between cultures and traditions--a landmark in Asian-American literature. When it was first published in America in 1968, Chuang Hua's evocative novel "Crossings" was completely unheralded and quickly went out of print. Years later it would be widely recognized as the first modernist novel to address the Asian-American experience, its deeply imagistic prose--marked by spatial and temporal leaps, an unconventional syntax, and unanticipated shifts in plot--as haunting as the writing of Jane Bowles. At the center of "Crossings" is Fourth Jane, the fourth of seven children whose recollections of an oppressive yet loving father, Dyadya, are collaged with her constant migrations between four continents. Suffering from a domestic torpor occasionally enlivened by ritualistic preparations of food for her foreign lover, Jane's displacement only heightens the remembrance of what she has fled: a breech of the familial code; a failed romance; and further in the past, the desolation of war as "bloated corpses flowed in the current of the yellow river." Spare, lyrical, Taoist in form and elusiveness, visually cinematic, tender and sensual, Chuang Hua's powerful narrative endures as one of the most moving and original works of literature in the history of American letters. |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Fiction |
Dewey: FIC |
LCCN: 2007010330 |
Physical Information: 0.55" H x 5.32" W x 7.92" (0.51 lbs) 222 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Restored to print after its original run in 1968, a modernist tale on the Asian-American experience finds Fourth Jane struggling with her developing sense of self in spite of frequent family relocations throughout four continents and a loving but oppressive father. Reprint. |
Contributor Bio(s): Ling, Amy: - Amy Ling (d. 1999), critic and scholar, was the founding director of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. |