The Radiance of Ashes

1. Start with the table of contents and jump to poets by country or era rather than reading straight through.
2. After finishing one poet's selections, pause to consider recurring images, then move to the next.
3. Read alongside the poet portraits, comparing visual impressions with the lines, and keep your own reading notes.
4. When you find a poet you love, seek out their individual collection or compare different translations to read beyond the anthology.

Tianjin People's Publishing House publishes across such fields as classic works, foreign literature, architecture, social culture and social sciences, with 749 relevant titles in the collection. In the areas of classics and scholarship, works such as Wang Guowei's Renjian Cihua and Fei Xiaotong's From the Soil and Fertility and Reproduction reflect a sustained attention to social culture and classic texts of thought. Architectural books are represented by Liang Sicheng's Annotated Yingzao Fashi and A History of Chinese Architecture, showing an emphasis on architectural heritage and building traditions. In foreign literature, translations of Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don and Tolstoy's War and Peace and The Death of Ivan Ilyich, through the work of translators such as Li Gang and Yu Dawei, form a substantial series of translated works. Overall, the press combines classic texts, scholarly works and fine translations, with a publishing character oriented toward humanistic depth and the dissemination of knowledge.