Love in a Fallen City

Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China.

"[A] giant of modern Chinese literature" -The New York Times

"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." -Ang Lee

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction--tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

EILEEN CHANG (1920-1995) was born in Shanghai. In 1952 she migrated to Hong Kong to work as a translator for the American News Agency. She fled Communist China for the United States in 1956, never to return again. After living in New York, Chang moved to California, where she was a prominent fiction writer, essayist, public intellectual, and translator. In September 1995 she was found dead in her Los Angeles department. Her works include Romances, The Rice-Sprout Song: A Novel of Modern China, and The Rouge of the North.

Karen S. Kingsbury taught English in Chonqing on the Whitman-in-China program, studied Chinese in Taipei and, for fourteen years, taught English language and literature at Tunghai University in Taichung. Her Columbia University doctoral dissertation was on Eileen Chang, and she has published previous translations of Chang's essays and fiction in Renditions and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. She also translated Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance. She is currently a professor of International Studies at Chatham University.