"There are Bamboos in the Southern Wilderness" Author: Lu Yuan Shanghai People's Publishing House

★ A collection of Lu Yuan’s representative novels, recommended by Zhu Yue and Dan Bao.

★ 10 interrelated short stories, showing the ultimate combination of historical imagination and language pleasure. Telling the bizarre era of the Republic of China, the hot land of Guangxi where everything is flourishing.

★ In these stories, the little characters are like Don Quixote on the land of China. They pursue and experience disillusionment passionately and lonely, but silently resist the decline of the world.

This book contains 10 interrelated short stories, which can be regarded as different chapters of a grand story. It depicts the turbulent times of warlords fighting in the south of the Republic of China. The arrogant dancers, the downtrodden poets, the skilled carpenters, the wandering rural intellectuals... They are full of absurdity, funny and humbleness, but they still tenaciously make a living and seek love in the gloomy fate, blooming with the brilliance of legend and romance.

This collection of novels inherits the memory of ancestors - many of the historical details come from the author's father's memories and narration. Lu Yuan is familiar with the past of Guangxi during the Republic of China, and has a subtle and vivid description of the streets, shops, factories, rural landscapes, and lifestyles in and around Nanning at that time. In the gaps of history, he laid out a series of magnificent and wonderful past events for us. These words are like silver needles that will eventually pierce the deepest part of our hearts.

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The presentation of dialogues and the description of events are perfectly twisted into a thick, spiraling curve that is rooted in the folk land. The vicissitudes of life and the taste of fate derived from it make people sigh and applaud in amazement.

——Xiao Tao

The author must live with the characters he writes about. When they start to move in the morning, he gets up; at night, when the author falls asleep, they also disappear into the black abyss.

——Beijing Youth Daily

This (Lu Yuan's novel) is a paradise for dreamers who know neither day nor night, it is a stage for debaters to display their eloquence and mantras, it is a casino where fanatical philosophers gamble on their passion for learning, it is a carnival where cold-eyed artists pierce the sky of the world with their diffuse satires.

——West Lake

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