Fortress Besieged

The fiction writer, essayist, editor, and poet Qian Zhongshu (1910–1998) was one of China’s foremost “scholar-novelists.” With a mastery of Chinese, English, Greek, Latin, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, Qian is seen by many as the last link in an unbroken chain of geniuses stretching back to Confucius. In 1935, he passed his examinations with the highest score in history. He wrote landmark texts on classical Chinese literature as well as short stories, poems, essays, and a second unfinished novel, Heart of the Artichoke, which was lost in the wartime mail. Jeanne Kelly received her B.A. in Russian at Indiana University and her M.A. in Chinese from the University of Wisconsin. Nathan K. Mao was a Professor of English at Shippensburg University and the translator of Ba Jin’s Cold Nights and Li Yu’s Twelve Towers. Jonathan D. Spence (1936—2021) was Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, where he taught for more than forty years. He was awarded MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Search for Modern China won the Lionel Gelber Award and the Kiriyama Book Prize. The acclaimed author of ten books and the Director of Princeton’s Creative Writing Department, Yiyun Li has won a MacArthur, a Guggenheim and the PEN/Faulkner, PEN/Hemingway, and PEN/Jean Stein Awards.

"That the novel existed at all seemed a miracle. It’s like War and Peace without the war."