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Beijing: Portrait
of a City
Compiled by Alexandra Pearson and Lucy
Cavender
FICTION & NON-FICTION
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Alexandra Pearson
spent her teenage years in China in the early eighties, and returned to Beijing
in 1992 to study ethnomusicology at The Central Conservatory of Music. In 2002
she established a little book bar in Beijing called The Bookworm, which has
since evolved into thriving hubs of literary activity in three cities across
China.
Lucy Cavender first came to Beijing in 1985
as a student, and later followed a career in development for the European
Commission and the United Nations in Brussels, Mongolia, Central Asia, Malaysia
and China. She has lived in Beijing for the past ten years with her husband,
James Jynge, and three children, Tom, Ella and Ollie.
Zhu Wen is a poet, writer and film
director originally from Fujian Province. He is best known in English for his
collection of short stories, I Love Dollars. In this collection, he
contributes three previously untranslated poems that were written shortly after
he arrived to live in the unfamiliar northern capital.
Adam Williams is a long-term Beijing
resident with a family history in China that dates back to the 1880’s. He is the
author of a China trilogy which culminates in The Dragon’s Tail. The
Camels of Khanbalik is a lyrical insight into how perception is sifted through
the veils of memory and imagination.
Roy Kesey is an up and coming writer of
short stories who is soon to be a household name. He has recently published his
own collection of stories, All Over and one of his works was selected to
be in Best of American Short Stories. In Portrait of a City he
takes the reader on a mesmeric journey through a well-known recent epic.
Ma Jian is best known for his award
winning travel book Red Dust. His essay takes us back to the 1980’s when
now famous artists, authors, poets and musicians huddled in his small ‘hutong’
house discussing politics, philosophy and art.
Alfreda Murck is an art historian
specialising in the history of Song dynasty painting. Her publications include
Poetry and Painting in Song China: The Subtle Art of Dissent. In
Portrait of a City she leads us through the back alleys of Panjiayuan market
and into the intricacies of a wheeler dealer culture.
Tim Clissold is a well-known writer and
businessman whose first book, Mr China, has appeared on best seller lists
worldwide. With two decades of experience in China and a passion for protecting
the environment, he uses the wisdom of China’s ancient philosophy to comment on
the city’s environmental malaise.
Catherine Sampson is a Beijing-based crime
writer who, following the success of her first three crime novels, has brought
her characters to Beijing’s murkier underworld. In this collection she follows a
character introduced in her third novel Pool of Unease, and sets her
story against a backdrop of migrant workers and their privations.
Peter Hessler is famous for River Town,
his sublime account of life in a town on the Yangtze River. His follow-up,
Oracle Bones was shortlisted for a US National Book Award. In Portrait of
a City, Peter recounts a moving true story of a young boy, his illness, and
experience in a hospital in Beijing.
Karen Smith, the author of Nine Lives,
the Birth of Avant Garde Art in Contemporary China, gives us an insight into
the early days of the marginalized artist’s communities as they tried to
flourish in Beijing.
Paul French has written several books on
China which display his polyglot talents and range of interests the latest of
which is Carl Crow, a Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times, and Adventures
of an American in Shanghai. Here, he takes a real life unsolved murder case
from Peking in 1937 to create a riveting whodunit.
Michael Aldrich,
author of The Search for a Vanishing Beijing, gives us a captivating take
on Beijing’s little known but considerable Mongolian heritage.
Hong Ying is best known in English for the
novels K: the Art of Love, Summer of Betrayal, Peacock Cries, and her
autobiography Daughter of the River. She is something of a literary icon
in the gay community following her brave novels which focus on injustice and
compassion in Chinese society. For Portrait of a City, she takes the
reader into parts of Beijing that few would know existed.
Rob Gifford was NPR correspondent in China
and then took a road trip from Shanghai to the Kazakh border, a journey that
became the subject of his 2007 book, China Road. Here he captures the
architectural transformation of Beijing as it girds itself for the summer
Olympics. Books by
these authors
Beijing: Portrait of a City |
