The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up

Yiwu, Liao; Huang, Wen [Translator]; Gourevitch, Philip [Foreword]

ISBN 10: 037542542X / ISBN 13: 9780375425424

Published by Pantheon, 2008

About this Item

Copyright 2002, stated first edition. No additional printings indicated. Very good hardcover with dust jacket. Binding is tight, sturdy, and square. Black papered over boards are VG with sharp corners. Gilt titling on spine is bright and bold. No previous owner markings. Not a remainder. Pages are bright; text is very good throughout. Unclipped dust jacket ($25.00 US) is VG, no chips or tears. Due to the size/weight of this book extra charges may apply for international shipping. Ships same or next business day from Dinkytown in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Seller Inventory # 322737

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up
• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037542542X
• ISBN 13: 9780375425424
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • History Asia

About this title

Synopsis

The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new” China--the China of economic growth and globalization-—is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives.

Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others–people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity.

Liao crafted the interviews (conducted between 1990 and 2003) with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is an idiosyncratic, powerful, and richly revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known.

About the Author

Liao Yiwu is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. In 1989, he published an epic poem, "Massacre," that condemned the killings in Tiananmen Square and for which he spent four years in prison. His works include Testimonials and Report on China's Victims of Injustice. In 2003, he received a Human Rights Watch Hellman-Hammett Grant, and in 2007, he received a Freedom to Write Award from the Independent Chinese PEN Center. He lives in China.

Wen Huang is a writer and freelance journalist whose articles and translations have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Asia, the Chicago Tribune, the South China Morning Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Paris Review.