Books | fourseasonspress

Mu Xin (1927-2011) is the pen name of a renowned Chinese writer and artist. Born in Wuzhen, near Shanghai, China, into a wealthy aristocratic family, Mu Xin was among the last generation to receive a classical education in the literati tradition, while at the same time he was also exposed through voluminous reading to the highest achievements of Western art and culture at a very young age. From 1947 to 1949, Mu Xin attended Shanghai Institute of the Arts. From 1949 to 1982, Mu Xin lived in China. Although he wrote profusely in that period, all of his earlier manuscripts were confiscated and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). In 1982 after coming to live in the US, Mu Xin began to publish books of short stories, prose, and poetry (in Chinese) and contributed regularly to literary columns in Chinese journals and newspapers outside the PRC. Among the Chinese diaspora, Mu Xin's works have attracted an intense following. Few Chinese writers in modern history have as firm a mastery of the Chinese cultural and linguistic heritage as Mu Xin does. Innovatively combining fiction, sanwen (a Chinese genre which blends characteristics of the essay, fiction, and poetry), and philosophical reflections, Mu Xin's writing is both profoundly Chinese and reminiscent of the internalization and unconventionality of Western modern masters. In addition to his literary accomplishments, Mu Xin was also a well recognized artist whose paintings are preserved, among other places, at Yale University and Harvard University Art Galleries, and now at the upcoming Mu Xin Museum in his hometown Wuzhen. In 2006, Mu Xin returned to China at the invitation of Wuzhen Township where the local government had renovated his family house. The same year, his writings were published for the first time in Mainland China.

Included in the collection are extremely rare interviews Mu Xin conducted while living in New York, and articles written by people, some of them know Mu Xin personally for more than decades while others know him through his writings and art.

A collection of poems by one of our leading poets, The West Door includes poems of serious and accomplished artistry. It takes up the poetry of earth, reminding us (as a note to one of the poems says) that “To have had the paradisal vision is to be ushered into a suffering world.” The centerpiece of the volume is a group of Vermont poems, especially the long narravtive “An Xmas Murder,” which develops implications surrounding a crime committed in Vermont during the 1950s as told by one of the witnesses. Particularly brilliant also is a sequence of poems on Irish themes—and another, titled “Tongues on Tress,” a series of emblems drawn from nature, each corresponding, even lightheartedly, to poetic intuitions. The West Door represents a step outward into daylight as well as darkness, the seasons of the year and of a life.

In these poems, characteristically combining narrative ease with crystalline intensity, Alfred Corn takes up new subjects and shows new capacities in developing them. Moving from the largely urban setting of his previous work, he responds to the regenerative power of landscape, American and European, in several lights, and explores those states of mind in which we are most ourselves: dream, meditation, lyric, memorial. Throughout the volume there is an uncanny balance between states of mind and things as they are, a balance that accounts for Corn’s powers as both a psychological and a descriptive poet. By the various lights of Alfred Corn’s poetry, we can glimpse the world as a whole.

A compelling first novel about love, war, family and one woman's life of great hardship and even greater triumph. From the last days of the warlords to the tragedy at Tiananmen Square, it is the 100-year odyssey of Bittersweet, a headstrong peasant woman who rises from poverty and endures abandonment, patriarchy and revolution as the wife of the second most powerful man in China. This gripping story was inspired by the lives of the author's grandfather, the first democratically elected Vice President of China and subsequently Acting President, and her grandmother, a woman you won't soon forget.

“Just Us Girls” is the official companion book to the documentary-in-progress “The Kim Loo Sisters”, as well as an intimate portrait of four remarkable women. The ‘Kimmies', as the sisters were called, were the first Asian American act to star in Broadway musical revues of the 1930s and '40s. During the Great Depression, they thrived on the national vaudeville circuit as a family act, and eventually received top billing on Broadway with such luminaries as Frank Sinatra and the Three Stooges.

Featuring over 150 pages of interviews with all four sisters, more than fifty vintage photographs, and much more, “Just Us Girls” is a fascinating story spanning the 20th century, the spangled stages of Broadway, and a single immigrant family’s quest to realize the American dream.

“The Kim Loo Sisters”, a feature-length documentary about the lives and careers of the four sisters, has been shot and edited, and is now in post-production. The publisher of “Just Us Girls” is generously donating all proceeds from the sale of the book towards the film's post-production costs. (For more information about the film, or if you would like to contribute, please visit http://www.KimLooSisters.com)

Fan Zeng is a widely respected master of Chinese painting and calligraphy, a renowned scholar of Chinese classics, and a poet. Well versed in both Chinese and western works of literature, history, and philosophy from the classics to contemporary works, Fan Zeng advocates the principle of “returning to the classics and returning to nature.” Through the application of the aesthetic principle “poetry as soul and calligraphy as bone,” he has made immeasurable contributions to the development of Chinese painting and spearheaded the Neoclassicism movement in Chinese art. He authored some 150 books, including The Poems of a Dignified Gentleman, On the Art of Chinese Painting, A Casual Study of Chinese Classic Prose and History, Fan Zeng’s Poems, of which, about 130 are in the collections of the National Library of China.

This is his first book in English published in the US.