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CITY GATE, OPEN UP By Bei Dao
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eBay item number:125229920823
Item specifics
- Condition
- Type
- Paperback
- Publication Name
- New Directions
- ISBN-10
- 0811226433
- ISBN
- 9780811226431
- Book Title
- City Gate, Open Up
- Item Length
- 8in
- Publisher
- New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publication Year
- 2017
- Format
- Trade Paperback
- Language
- English
- Item Height
- 1in
- Genre
- Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism
- Topic
- Asian / Chinese, Literary
- Item Width
- 5.3in
- Item Weight
- 0.4 Oz
- Number of Pages
- 320 Pages
About this product
Product Information
In 2001, to visit his sick father, the exiled poet Bei Dao returned to his homeland for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. "My city that once was had vanished," he writes: "I was a foreigner in my hometown." The shock of this experience released a flood of memories and emotions that sparked Open Up, City Gate. In this lyrical autobiography of growing up--from the birth of the People's Republic, through the chaotic years of the Great Leap Forward, and on into the Cultural Revolution--Bei Dao uses his extraordinary gifts as a poet and storyteller to create another Beijing, a beautiful memory palace of endless alleyways and corridors, where personal narrative mixes with the momentous history he lived through. At the center of the book are his parents and siblings, and their everyday life together through famine and festival. Open Up, City Gate is told in an episodic, fluid style that moves back and forth through the poet's childhood, recreating the smells and sounds, the laughter and the danger, of a boy's coming of age during a time of enormous change and upheaval.
Product Identifiers
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN-10
0811226433
ISBN-13
9780811226431
eBay Product ID (ePID)
228669903
Product Key Features
Book Title
City Gate, Open Up
Format
Trade Paperback
Language
English
Topic
Asian / Chinese, Literary
Publication Year
2017
Genre
Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism
Number of Pages
320 Pages
Dimensions
Item Length
8in
Item Height
1in
Item Width
5.3in
Item Weight
0.4 Oz
Additional Product Features
Lc Classification Number
Pl2892.E525z46 2017
Reviews
Bei Dao's writing provides ample evidence of the written word's potential to effect political change.... Few living writers possess a voice as elegant., "City Gate, Open Up holds a vertiginous, intimate kaleidoscope of vignettes and portraits, in which a changing city, family, community, and country are presented as quick life-drawings, sketched from within. The drama of famine becomes a few candies in the mouths of half-starved boys scouring fields for weeds; the Cultural Revolution, an attic-hidden library of pre-war movie magazines, anatomy, and fiction carried into a hutong courtyard's fire for burning. Soon after, the author builds a traveling bookcase backpack, holding only the works of Mao. One local official's suicide abuts his successor's ferocious skill at ping pong; a son discovers, as inner cultural inheritance, his father's "little tyrant," then struggles for tenderness as time rearranges their relative power. From its haunting opening description of Beijing's early light bulbs, their rarity and weakness, this book's jump-cuts of memory move backward and forward in time. These pages illuminate, obliquely and acutely, the story of a now-famous dissident poet's rebellious emergence and survival, within the story of the intelligentsia's larger harrowing amid the Chinese Revolution's whiplash unfoldings.", A nuanced account of China in the era of the Cultural Revolution, seen through one young man's eyes. Since that young man became a poet, it is also beautifully textured, full of the sounds, sights, and scents of a Beijing that is no more., In 18 essays, crafted with poetic precision and enriched by Jeffrey Yang's assiduous translation, Bei Dao depicts a cast of memorable characters with humor and insight: a tenacious family nanny always on the lookout for revolutionary opportunities; a talented schoolmate who sneaked across the border to Burma to join guerrilla forces; and the author's father, a former government propaganda official and a moody authoritarian at home... [These] essays are clear and intimate, like the black-and-white snapshots scattered through the text. While the descriptive opulence of his prose evokes Beijing's sights, sounds and smells, it can be overwhelming at times... Poignant., ""A nuanced account of China in the era of the Cultural Revolution, seen through one young man's eyes. Since that young man became a poet, it is also beautifully textured, full of the sounds, sights, and scents of a Beijing that is no more."", City Gate, Open Up is an ocean of recollections. Bei Dao's impressionistic account of his childhood and youth in Beijing, is unlike any book he has ever written. He builds an imaginative city that readers can actually inhabit, much like his early poetry creates concepts worth living for. -- Ratik Asokan, Caravan Magazine, Written with honesty, conscience and courage, this is a powerful account that merges personal memories with the collective history in the making of modern China, and inspires the reader to consider the many important social and political concerns in Chinese society that still remain today., The soul of post-Mao poetry, Bei Dao reveals in this intimate, lyrical memoir a China that still haunts us with its brutal past and aching humanity. Like Balzac's Paris, Dickens' London, and Pushkin's St. Petersburg, Bei Dao's Beijing is a microcosm caught in a time warp, forever titillating our imagination., In 18 essays, crafted with poetic precision and enriched by Jeffrey Yang's assiduous translation, Bei Dao depicts a cast of memorable characters with humor and insight: a tenacious family nanny always on the lookout for revolutionary opportunities; a talented schoolmate who sneaked across the border to Burma to join guerrilla forces; and the author's father, a former government propaganda official and a moody authoritarian at home... [These] essays are clear and intimate, like the black-and-white snapshots scattered through the text. While the descriptive opulence of his prose evokes Beijing's sights, sounds and smells, it can be overwhelming at times... Poignant., In 18 essays, crafted with poetic precision and enriched by JeffreyYang's assiduous translation, Bei Dao depicts a cast of memorablecharacters with humor and insight: a tenacious family nanny always onthe lookout for revolutionary opportunities; a talented schoolmate whosneaked across the border to Burma to join guerrilla forces; and theauthor's father, a former government propaganda official and a moodyauthoritarian at home... [These] essays are clear and intimate, like theblack-and-white snapshots scattered through the text. While thedescriptive opulence of his prose evokes Beijing's sights, sounds andsmells, it can be overwhelming at times... Poignant., "The language of Bei Dao's memoir, seamlessly translated by fellow poetYang, is elegantly simple and guilelessly accessible....Winter whitecabbage, vinyl records, pet rabbits, banned books, and first and last "Ilove yous" provide intimate glimpses that "open up" to revealextraordinary, immediate testimony of challenges survived in a lifeintensely lived.", Bei Dao''s writing provides ample evidence of the written word''s potential to effect political change.... Few living writers possess a voice as elegant., A nuanced account of China in the era of the Cultural Revolution,seen through one young man's eyes. Since that young man became a poet,it is also beautifully textured, full of the sounds, sights, and scentsof a Beijing that is no more., "City Gate, Open Up holds a vertiginous, intimate kaleidoscope of vignettes and portraits, in which a changing city, family, community, and country are presented as quick life-drawings, sketched from within. The drama of famine becomes a few candies in the mouths of half-starved boys scouring fields for weeds; the Cultural Revolution, an attic-hidden library of pre-war movie magazines, anatomy, and fiction carried into a hutong courtyard's fire for burning. Soon after, the author builds a traveling bookcase backpack, holding only the works of Mao. One local official's suicide abuts his successor's ferocious skill at ping pong; a son discovers, as inner cultural inheritance, his father's "little tyrant," then struggles for tenderness as time rearranges their relative power. From its haunting opening description of Beijing's early light bulbs, their rarity and weakness, this book's jump-cuts of memory move backward and forward in time. These pages illuminate, obliquely and acutely, the story of a now-famous dissident poet's rebellious emergence and survival, within the story of the intelligentsia's larger harrowing amid the Chinese Revolution's whiplash unfoldings.", With precise lyricism, Bei Dao resurrects a vanished city and time in China, creating a rich literary-cum-historical record of the world's greatest national transformation. But this tender memoir by a great poet also describes the poignant longings, small joys and sorrows of all of us who grew up in places called 'underdeveloped.', "The language of Bei Dao's memoir, seamlessly translated by fellow poet Yang, is elegantly simple and guilelessly accessible....Winter white cabbage, vinyl records, pet rabbits, banned books, and first and last "I love yous" provide intimate glimpses that "open up" to reveal extraordinary, immediate testimony of challenges survived in a life intensely lived.", City Gate, Open Up is an ocean of recollections. Bei Dao'simpressionistic account of his childhood and youth in Beijing, is unlikeany book he has ever written. He builds an imaginative city thatreaders can actually inhabit, much like his early poetry createsconcepts worth living for. -- Ratik Asokan, Caravan Magazine, Bei Dao uses words as if he were fighting for his life with them. He has found a way to speak for all of us., "In an aside at a reading, Robert Lowell muttered: "Memory is genius, really." To me, Bei Dao's poems are the work of a genius anyway, a genius of juxtaposing, of simplicity, of acceleration, of tunnelling through emblem and image. But they left me quite unprepared for City Gate, Open Up, which is genius in another sense, in Lowell's sense....all preserved in Jeffrey Yang's wonderfully energetic and responsive translation."
Copyright Date
2017
Target Audience
Trade
Lccn
2016-039663
Item description from the seller
Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing.
eBay item number:125229920823
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New York, New York, United States
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