International Authors Book Club

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. October’s nation is China. 

To get you started, check out our list of a few contemporary and literary award-winning authors. The titles, a combination of fiction and nonfiction, are available through your Santa Fe Public Library as books or (if noted) ebooks (Hoopla or Overdrive/Libby).

For disability accommodations, please contact a Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

The authors are listed family name first, traditional in many Asian countries, or by pen name.

Suggested authors:

Gao Xingjian, author of The Other Shore: Poems; Return to Painting and Soul Mountain  

Soul Mountain was written while traveling across China after the writer’s false diagnosis of terminal cancer was discovered.

Ge Fei, author of A Flock of Brown Birds, the Jiangnan trilogy and The Invisibility Cloak (eaudiobook)

Although well-known to Chinese audiences since the 1980s, Ge Fei is gaining traction internationally thanks to recent English translations. He won the 2015 Mao Dun prize for his Jiangnan trilogy, a tale of tragedy, abuse and misdirected love in 1950s China.

The Invisibility Cloak is a slightly surreal story of misfortune, menace, and high-end stereo equipment in the cutthroat, capitalistic world of modern China.

Ha Jin, author of The Boat Rocker; The Bridegroom: Stories; A Distant Center (Poems); A Free Life; A Good Fall: Stories; A Map of Betrayal; Nanjing Requiem and Waiting*

The Chinese-born American poet and novelist is most associated with the Misty Poetry movement. Waiting received the National Book Award, PEN/Faulkner Award and the Townsend Prize for Fiction.

It is based on a true story that Jin heard from his wife when they visited her family at an army hospital in China. The plot revolves around three people: Lin Kong, the army doctor; his wife Shuyu, whom he has never loved; and the nurse Manna Wu, his girlfriend at the hospital where he works. Beginning in 1963 and stretching over a 20-year period, Waiting is set against the background of a changing Chinese society, contrasting city and country life and showing the restrictions on individual freedoms as a part of life under communism.

In Nanjing Requiem, American missionary and women's college dean Minnie Vautrin decides to remain at her school during a violent Japanese attack that renders the school a refugee center for ten thousand women and children.

Lao She, author of Cat Country and Rickshaw Boy

Shu Qingchun, known by his pen name Lao She, was a Manchurian writer known for his vivid portrayal of urban life and his colorful use of the Beijing dialect, such as in the novel Rickshaw Boy and numerous plays, including Teahouse.

Liu Cixin, author of Ball Lightning, Supernova Era, The Three-Body Problem trilogy, To Hold Up the Sky, A View from the Stars, The Wandering Earth and The Weight of Memories (ebook)

Nine-time winner of the Galaxy Award for Chinese science fiction writing, Liu Cixin burst onto the international scene after the English translation of The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo award.

Liu Ken, author of The Dandelion Dynasty series

Liu has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards for his short stories as well as the epic fantasy novel series, The Dandelion Dynasty, which he calls silkpunk, a term coined by him to encapsulate the way it blends the material culture and philosophical roots of East Asian antiquity in an alternative vision of modernity.

In addition, Liu has translated many notable Chinese SF works into English, including all of Cixin Liu’s works, winning multiple Hugo awards for best translation as well.

Liu Xiaobo, author of No Enemies, No Hatred: selected essays and poems

His first book, Criticism of the Choice: Dialogues with Li Zehou, was published in 1987. He also wrote June Fourth Elegies: Poems.  In 2008, he and fellow activists released Charter 08, a petition calling for democracy and an end to censorship. He was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in prison. He became the first Chinese man to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. He died from liver cancer in 2017 at the age of 61 while in prison.

Liu Zhenyun, author of Cell Phone, Chicken Feathers Everywhere, The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon (ebook), One Sentence is a Thousand Sentences and Working Unit

The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super-rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption.

Ma Jian, author of Beijing Coma, China Dream (book and eaudiobook), The Dark Road, The Noodle Maker, Red Dust and Stick Out Your Tongue

The Chinese-born British writer and dissident was jailed after his paintings were denounced during China’s Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1983. After his release, he began writing dark satires about China focusing on the Tiananmen Square massacre -- Beijing Coma and The Noodle Maker -- from Hong Kong and later Germany. All his books have been banned in China for the past 25 years.

Mai Jia, author of Decoded, In the Dark and Plot

Decoded takes you deep into the world of code breaking and the mysterious world of Unit 701, a top-secret Chinese intelligence agency. It is based on his 17-year career in intelligence work. Mai Jia (birthname Jiang Benhu) leads two Chinese literary organizations. Many of his bestsellers were adapted for TV and film.

Mo Yan, author of Big Breasts, Wide Hips; Frog, The Garlic Ballads; Life and Death are Wearing Me Out and  Red Sorghum: A Novel of China*

China's most revered and oft-banned novelist won the Nobel Prize in 2012 for being a writer “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” Mo (birthname Guan Moye) is considered the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller. Frog chronicles the sweeping history of modern China through the lens of the nation's controversial one-child policy.

Sheng Keyi, author of Death Fugue (ebook) and Northern Girls

Banned in China for its taboo allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, Sheng Keyi's Death Fugue is a dystopian satire that imagines a world of manufactured existence, the erasure of personal freedom, and the perils of governmental control.

Her novel Northern Girls, which looks at the life of a migrant worker, is based on some of the author’s own experiences, as well as those of others. It was shortlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize.

Wang Anyi, author of Fu Ping (ebook), I Love Bill and Other Stories (ebook), Lapse of Time, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow*, and Temptress Moon

Many of her works are set in Shanghai, where she lived and worked for most of her life. Wang also regularly writes about the countryside, where she was sent during the Cultural Revolution. Her mother was the well-regarded short-story writer Ru Zhijuan whose works (1958-80) were translated into English after the Cultural Revolution.

Xia Jia, author of various short stories and A Summer Beyond Your Reach

The well-regarded short story writer (real name Wang Yao) and literary scholar’s works have been translated into English collections including Clarkesworld, Nature, and Upgraded, which include the dark short story A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight; the story of a human girl who is the only mortal living on an eerie street of ghosts.

Xu Zechen, author of Beijing Sprawl, Heaven on Earth, Jerusalem, Midnight’s Door, Running Through Beijing and The Selected Stories of Xu Zechen

Born in 1978, Xu Zechen writes about the underbelly of contemporary urban life in China’s largest cities. He is considered one of the rising stars in the Chinese literary scene and has also held residencies and taught in the United States.

Yan Ge, author of The Chili Bean Paste Clan (ebook), Elsewhere: Stories; Strange Beasts of China, and The White Horse

Chengdu-born Yan Ge, whose real name is Dai Yuexing, is considered a rising, lively and new force in Chinese literary circles. While her early work focused on gods and ghosts, her recent novels fall into the realist fiction genre – and are almost always set in her homelands of western China. All showcase her biting humor.

The Chili Bean Paste Clan is based in a fictional Sichuan town where a host of middle-aged siblings are reunited for their grandmother’s 80th birthday. The plot reads rather like a soap opera; amid the festivities are secrets, lies, affairs, pregnancies, heart attacks and questioned parentage (not necessarily in that order).

Yan Lianke, author of Lenin's Kisses*, The Four Books; The Years, Months, Days: Two novellas; The Day the Sun Died, Dream of Ding Village and Serve the People! (ebook)

Yan Lianke won the Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize in 2013. He has also won two of China's most prestigious literary awards: the Lu Xan Literary Prize (in 1998 and 2001) and the Lao She Literary Award in 2005. In 2014, he won the Franz Kafka Prize.

The Day the Sun Died --winner of the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, one of the most prestigious honors for Chinese-language novels--is about a town caught in a waking nightmare. Suddenly one night, hundreds of residents are discovered sleepwalking while acting out desires they've suppressed while awake. Before long, it’s chaos, and up to Li Niannian and his parents to save the town before sunrise.

Yi A, author of A Perfect Crime and Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning (eaudiobook)

The former cop is known for his hardboiled mysteries coupled with a sharp indictment of Chinese society.

Yu Hua, author of Boy in the Twilight (stories); Brothers, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Cries in the Drizzle, To Live, The Seventh Day and China in 10 Words* (nonfiction)

Hua, whose works are shaped by his negative experiences growing up during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) became the first Chinese writer to win the James Joyce Award (2002) and the 2003 Ordrs des Arts et des Lettres in Franc for To Live, which uses ultra-violent fiction to detail the fate of a family from the start of  the 1937-45 Second Sino-Japanese War through the Cultural Revolution. The book was banned by the Chinese government for years before being declared one of the country’s great modern works.

Zhang Ailing, author of Love in a Fallen City

Zhang, also known as Eileen Chang, wrote this collection of six tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life.