"Harvest Novel 2021 Spring Volume" Author: "Harvest" Literary Magazine Editor/Jiang Yun/Wang Chunlin/Ma Boyong/He Ping/Xiao Er/Lai Yingyan/Yang Xiao Publisher: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House

Non-fiction

Northern Kitchen: A Family's Cooking History (Jiang Yun)

Brillat-Savarin, a world-renowned food philosopher, said: "Tell me what kind of food you eat and I will tell you what kind of person you are."

Writer Jiang Yun meticulously depicts a chronicle-like cooking history of a northern family. Behind each dish is a memory full of emotions. The work is mainly divided into three periods: grandmother, mother, and Jiang Yun's own cooking. In the era of material scarcity, the tenacious grandmother was in charge of the kitchen, and a large family was helplessly dispersed when facing great historical changes; the mother's cooking period coincided with the era of rectifying the wrongs, and the lively dinners every weekend, what people ate was delicious food, and what they really shared was the spiritual nourishment given to people by that era; Jiang Yun's cooking began in the golden age of literature... This is a family root-seeking history of Jiang Yun, a personal growth history, and also a material history of a society. The personal destiny and painful memories drawn by those foods have surpassed the food itself, and show the depth of human nature and philosophical thinking.

Novel

Lychees of Chang'an (Ma Boyong)

In the 14th year of Tianbao, Li Shande, a minor official in Chang'an City, suddenly received a task: to transport fresh lychees from Lingnan before the birthday of the imperial concubine. Lychees "change color in one day, fragrance in two days, and taste in three days", and Lingnan is more than 5,000 miles away from Chang'an. This is an impossible task, but for the sake of his family, Li Shande is determined to give it a try. With the help of Hu Shang and others, Li Shande determined the preservation method and transportation route through precise calculations and repeated experiments, and controlled the time to eleven days, and the transportation of fresh lychees was finally implemented. Everything was ready, but Li Shande did not expect that the last mountain in front of him was the officialdom.

Li Shande still brought fresh lychees, and for this, he lost his friends and nearly lost his life, but he never lost his original intention as a man and an official. The officialdom was treacherous, but his original intention remained unchanged, which ultimately saved him from the turbulent times.

Novel

The Fairy of Magpie Bridge (Xiao Er)

This is a spiritual work about a small town in the south of the Yangtze River. In the summer before the college entrance examination in 1981, the young people in the town began their half-life dream of acting. Many years later, the seemingly declining hometown town once again became the stage of life for the former childhood friends. Weddings and funerals, feasts and reunions, in the midst of separation and reunion, what is it that is hard to let go? The novel has the soft and fragrant Wu dialect and the subtle and detailed Jiangnan style.

Non-fiction

Three Thousand Miles to the Southwest: Retracing the Journey of the Hunan-Guizhou-Yunnan Tour Group in 1938 (Yang Xiao)

After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University moved to Changsha and established Changsha Temporary University. In February 1938, the Hunan-Guizhou-Yunnan Travel Group of the National Changsha Temporary University began its westward migration. More than 300 teachers and students, including Wen Yiduo, Huang Yusheng, Yuan Fuli, Li Jitong, Zeng Zhaolun, Mu Dan, Yang Shide, Ren Jiyu, Liu Zhaoji, and Lin Zhenshu, crossed more than 3,000 miles of southwest China in 68 days and arrived in Kunming.

In 2018, Yang Xiao, a media person born in the 1980s, set out from Changsha, mainly on foot, supplemented by rural minibuses, green trains and rideshares, and spent 40 days retracing this westward migration route. Relying on relevant historical materials scattered in archives, oral accounts, local history and newspapers of the Republic of China, he visited the courage and magnificence of the highways, rivers and post roads. He initiated interviews with the parties involved and their descendants, trying to restore how young people made choices one by one in the torrent of the times. History and reality are intertwined, intertextualized and collided, forming a dual-line narrative, which constitutes a cross-temporal and spatial dialogue among contemporary intellectuals.

About the Author · · · · · ·