The Attic: Memoir of a Chinese Landlords Son
by Guanlong Cao
Category: Biography & Autobiography

"Emotionally intense. With candor and humor, Cao reveals the reality of human pettiness and cruelty at a time of political repression and material scarcity."—Rey Chow, author of Writing Diaspora and Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema "In this poignant and moving memoir, Guanlong Cao has captured the beauty and the cruelty, the mundane and the memorable, in prose that is deceptively sparse. With uncommon wit and an eye for the bizarre, he has created a haunting image of contemporary China."—Howard Goldblatt, editor of Chairman Mao Would Not be Amused: Fiction from Today's China and translator of Blood Red Sunset "Beneath Cao's descriptions of daily life lurks an intense, troubled humanism. It generates metaphor and imagination that, like good poetry, can make you look again at ordinary things and see them as if for the first time. Occasionally it reaches out, grabs you, and pulls you cringing through pages you will never forget."—Perry Link, author of Evening Chats in Beijing and editor ofRoses and Thorns