Thunderstorm is Cao Yu's first play, written in 1933 and published in 1934 in the journal Literary Quarterly, when Cao Yu was twenty-three. It is a tragedy in four acts whose action is concentrated within a single day, from morning to a night of thunder and rain, and whose setting is mainly the drawing room of the Zhou mansion. Through the tangled grievances of two families, the Zhous and the Lus, and eight characters over some thirty years, it draws out buried secrets of birth and debts of love. The despotic and hypocritical patriarch Zhou Puyuan; Fanyi, long repressed and hungry for love and freedom; the weak and evasive Zhou Ping; the innocent Sifeng, caught in a forbidden love; and Shiping, returning after thirty years of humiliation—all gather on the eve of a sultry thunderstorm, their stifled emotions and secrets pressing toward a breaking point that finally erupts on that stormy night, sweeping the guilty and the innocent alike toward ruin. With dense symbolism and an almost tempestuous force, Cao Yu portrays the tyranny and sin of the old-style family and the struggle of human beings caught in the net of fate and moral obligation. The language is beautiful and the stage directions meticulous; many passages have been recited again and again, and scholars have long regarded the play as a "poetic drama." It is a landmark work marking the maturity of modern Chinese spoken drama, and for decades it has been read, staged, and translated into many languages.
People's Literature Publishing House publishes across classical literature, foreign literature, documentary writing and folk literature, with 492 titles in its catalogue. Representative books range from the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms to Lao She's Teahouse and Longxu Ditch in the Selected Works of Lao She, as well as translated foreign literature such as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Dante's Divine Comedy and Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels, alongside documentary and fictional works including Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and João Guimarães Rosa's The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Its authors include Chinese writers such as Lao She, translators such as Shen Emeri and Li Wenjun, and foreign authors such as James Wood. Overall, the house has a strong record in editing classic works and translating foreign literature, with a publishing character that bridges Chinese and foreign writing and values textual quality.
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