A Glance Back is a collection of novellas by the Taiwanese writer Cai Zhiheng (known online as "Pizi Cai"), comprising three novellas: "A Glance Back," "Forgetting," and "Meeting Myself in the Snow Realm." The theme remains love, and the prose continues Pizi Cai's humor and faint melancholy. The title novella "A Glance Back" tells of a tender romance on a Taiwanese high school campus in the 1980s and 1990s: a boy tormented by exam pressure and a ten-thousand-word off-campus essay contest, and a girl studying at the night supplementary school, share the same classroom, the same desk, and the same drawer at different times. The boy stuffs his discarded drafts into the drawer and one day receives a neatly handwritten note telling him to keep the drawer clean—because the drawer is not his alone. The two thus begin a question-and-answer exchange by note, trading records and greeting cards, and slowly an ambiguity grows from old Western songs and dry jokes. The whole story unfolds across the drawer and written words; only a year later do they learn each other's feelings, and then the change of classrooms interrupts it. Many years afterward, the two meet again in the same classroom, and the line "the Buddha said it takes five hundred glances back in a former life to earn a passing brush with someone in this one" becomes the emotional footnote of the whole piece. "Forgetting" tells of a man with a memory disorder caused by an injury in his youth and his encounter with a girl at a small eatery near his neighborhood; she repeatedly reminds him of things he has forgotten, and the question "Does it hurt?" draws out forgotten memories. "Meeting Myself in the Snow Realm" tells of a young Taiwanese professor who travels to Tibet because of a letter signed "Seven-Up" and encounters the legends of Tsangyang Gyatso at places such as Makye Ame; its style expands somewhat beyond the author's earlier pure love writing.
Volumes Publishing Company is a comprehensive publisher known for its titles on Chinese classics and literature and the arts. Its publishing covers classical literature, essays and miscellaneous writings, folk literature, foreign literature, and exam preparation books. Judging from the 269 titles in the database, the company emphasizes making classic works accessible to a broad readership. Representative books include Letters from Fu Lei to His Son, The Four Great Classical Novels, Teahouse, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, and Camel Xiangzi, with authors including Fu Lei, Cao Xueqin, Luo Guanzhong, Shi Nai'an, Wu Cheng'an, Lao She, Liu Xiang, and Liu Xin. The company has also developed series brands such as the Volumes Studio Chinese Classics and the Science Fiction Library, giving it a distinctive profile in organizing Chinese classics and promoting literary reading. Public information on its other publishing activities is limited.
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
