Lights
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Literary readers who enjoy calm, reflective essays.
- Readers interested in essays by modern and contemporary Chinese scholars.
- Those seeking a deep reading experience in a fragmented age.
- Readers who appreciate a writing style that fuses academic depth with reflections on life.
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking strong plot and fast-paced stories.
- Readers uninterested in personal, introspective expression.
Reading tips
- Reading in a relatively quiet, undisturbed setting is recommended, to immerse oneself in the atmosphere of thought the text creates.
- It need not be read all at once; it suits a bedside or desk book, to be dipped into according to one's mood.
- While reading, note how the author links concrete details of life with abstract historical and cultural reflection.
About the publisher
Hunan People's Publishing House is a publisher known for its strengths in the humanities and social sciences and in translated classic works. Its catalog covers biography, Eastern philosophy, philosophical reading, social fiction, classics, and essays, with a particular focus on introducing major foreign works of thought and literary classics. Representative titles include Stefan Zweig's Decisive Moments in History and The Struggle with the Daemon: Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness, and Seneca's On the Shortness of Life, alongside multiple volumes of selected fiction by Shen Congwen. Among the translators and authors represented are Liang Xijiang, Yuan Xiaoyi, Yi Siting, Pan Lu, and Ren Guoqiang. Beyond the 142 titles in this catalog, public information is limited, so no further publishing details are given here.
Contents
- 版权信息
- 第一辑 故土
- 乡土（之一）
- 乡土（之二）
- 乡土（之四）
- 旧日庭院
- 母校
- 第二辑 琐忆
- 灯火
- 雨中
- 忘却
- 关于季节的记忆
- 暮春
- 写在冬日
- 回想高考
- “有美一人”——《读人》续记
- 另类
- 寄宿
- 示众
- 乡居小记
- 陋室
- 经验
- 闲散的日子
- 一隅
- 夜话（之一）
- 夜话（之二）
- 夜话（之三）
- 夜话（之四）
- 记忆洪水
- 养鸟者语
- 第三辑 行旅
- 寻访激情
- 走过赣南
- 雨中过居庸关
- 访学之旅——东京·香港·台北
- 遥远，遥远——俄罗斯之行琐记
- 第四辑 伤悼
- 王瑶先生杂忆
- 中岛先生
- “今之人谁肯迂者！”——写在樊骏先生去世之后
- 送别富仁
- 第五辑 暮年
- 邻翁
- 梦入天国
- 关于“老年”的笔记（之一）
- 关于“老年”的笔记（之二）
- 关于“老年”的笔记（之三）
- 后记
FAQ
What are the themes of this book?
What is Zhao Yuan's writing style like?
How does this book differ from ordinary essay collections on the market?
Comments
Find this book
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.
About the author
Zhao Yuan was born in Lanzhou in 1945, with ancestral roots in Weishi, Henan. She is a researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Peking University in 1969 and received her master's degree in literature from Peking University in 1981, studying under Wang Yao. Her early research focused on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, and she later turned to the study of scholar-officials in the Ming-Qing transition. Her representative works include Difficult Choices, On Ten Novelists, Beijing: City and People, Son of the Earth, Family Members, Father and Son, In Search of Yitang, and the three-volume selected edition Classic Masterpieces of Shen Congwen. Her writing spans literary appreciation and social-science research, combining close reading of fiction and classics with deep inquiry into the intellectual world of scholar-officials and urban culture. Her style is solid and intellectually rigorous, and she has had a lasting influence in both modern Chinese literary studies and Ming-Qing intellectual and cultural history.
