Mu Xin is best known as a writer and not a painter. He sustains the Chinese mode of returning to the art of the past and refreshing it for the present. He came to the United States in 1982, has written a dozen books here, and is a literary cult figure in Taiwan and among intellectuals in the Chinese diaspora.

Holland Cotter, The New York Times

A dazzling cycle of short stories by one of China’s most revered contemporary writers and one of the world’s leading artist-intellectuals.

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An Empty Room

Fiction by Mu Xin

Translated from Chinese by Toming Jun Liu

An Empty Room is the first book by the celebrated Chinese writer Mu Xin to appear in English. A cycle of thirteen tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, this collection is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingways’ In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin’s wandering “I” interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An Empty Room is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss, and humanity regained.

Paperback(published May, 23 2011)

ISBN
9780811219228
Price US
15.95
Price CN
17
Page Count
192

Ebook(published May, 23 2011)

ISBN
9780811219662
Price US
13.95
Page Count
192
Portrait of Mu Xin

Mu Xin

Contemporary Chinese fiction writer and visual artist

Mu Xin is best known as a writer and not a painter. He sustains the Chinese mode of returning to the art of the past and refreshing it for the present. He came to the United States in 1982, has written a dozen books here, and is a literary cult figure in Taiwan and among intellectuals in the Chinese diaspora.

Holland Cotter, The New York Times

These stories have an exquisite, crystalline quality ably captured by Liu’s flawless translation.

Publishers Weekly

Mu Xin cultivates the whispering power of reverie.

New York Magazine