"The Landscape of Waves" Author: Zhou Jianing Publisher: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House Douban 2022 Chinese Literature (Fiction)

“My friends and I were in a tropical storm in the 1990s. I took my friends on my bike and headed straight into the water, pedaling hard.

And then, together, we entered the next century of dryness.”

——Zhou Jianing

※ Four years later, Zhou Jianing's new collection of novellas after Basic Beauty, including Goodbye Eclipse, Landscape of Waves and Tomorrow's Party, completes the millennial novella trilogy. Starting with the three themes of "genius girls", underground clothing and radio culture, the solid, precise and restrained narrative outlines the inner qualities of a generation of Chinese people who grew up in the context of globalization.

※ About collective memory and individual dreams, the wind on the crest of the waves and good luck, the wreckage left in the shallows, friendship and monuments. The resonance from the beginning of the century fills this moment, until the passion that once occurred reshapes itself in the increasingly complete order.

※ From a remote small town in the United States, to a basement called "Windbreak" somewhere in Nanjing, from a southbound train packed with Luo Dayou's fans, to the Shanghai Dimei Underground City that no longer exists, Zhou Jianing writes about friendship, love, and dreams in the tide of the times, and provides readers with "a clean and bright place" in the form of a novel.

This book collects three novellas written by Zhou Jianing from 2019 to the present: Goodbye Solar Eclipse (2019), Landscape of Waves (2021), and Tomorrow's Party (2022).

"Goodbye Solar Eclipse": Japanese writer Taku Mitsushima revisits the small town of Paonia after 20 years and reunites with his friends from his youth. The Chinese girl Quan, who has a secret past, has long been lost in the depths of the world, and is only preserved in fiction by Taku's words. At this moment, in the utopia where lakes, grasslands and forests meet, a funeral has ended and a solar eclipse will be witnessed.

"The Landscape of Waves": As if to continue the old dream at the end of the century, "I" and Qunqing joined the team of new century trendsetters, set up a stall in the underground city of Dimei, and started a clothing business. In the tide of the times, friendship, love, money and dreams were raised high, and then quickly swept away, leaving a foam on the ground. When "I" stood in front of the pyramid on the beach, I decided not to be a victim trapped in memories anymore, but to stretch out my arms and send a signal of bravery to the universe.

"Tomorrow's Party": Zhang Zhou, the host of the music program on the midnight radio, is like a band without a form, connecting the friendship between "me", Wang Lu, Xiao Xiao and a group of people in the "Operation Command". We traveled through Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing and Taipei at the beginning of the century, and tried to build a "Tomorrow's Party" about the musical dream in virtual time and space and in the Yangtze River Estuary Wetland. However, under the pressure of the times, everything seems difficult to maintain. The people who survived the disaster went downstream, grateful, docked on this side of the river, and waved to the other side of the river.

Zhou Jianing,

Writer, translator of English literature. Published short story collection Basic Beauty, novels In the Woods and Deserted City, etc.