Evokes the moods and impulses of individuals, from intellectuals to factory workers, during the years of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath

Waves

Literature & Fiction

Dao, Bei

McDougall, Bonnie S.

History & Criticism

Seven Oaks Pr

First published in the US in 1990, the year after the uprising of Chinese students at Tiananmen Square, The August Sleepwalker collects all the early poetry of Bei Dao, China's premier poet, now living in exile. The August Sleepwalker is an extremely popular book (30,000 copies sold in China in one month) which was quickly banned by the Chinese government. The collection includes all of the poems Bei Dao published between 1970 and 1986. Bei Dao has lived in exile since the Tiananmen Incident. He is widely esteemed as one of contemporary China's most significant writers. His work is experimental, and subjective, while remaining passionately engaged in the individual's response to a disordered world.

August Sleepwalker

Poetry

New Directions

The August Sleepwalker

In Waves, the poet Bei Dao turns to fiction, recording the painful years of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Avoiding polemics, his attention is on individuals swept up in the turbulent political tides of contemporary China.

Waves: Stories & Novella (New Directions Paperbook)

Short Stories & Anthologies

Old Snow: Poetry

Old Snow: Poems (English, Chinese and Chinese Edition)

Pei-Tao

Chen, Maiping

A distinguished Chinese poet in Western exile since the events of Tiananmen Square moves beyond his previous works, which focus on the exile, to reflect upon personal and world history, emotion, individuality, and conflict.

Forms of Distance

Collects fifty poems in both Chinese and English that reflect futility, distance, and the possibility of love's renewal

Landscape over Zero (New Directions Paperbook, 831) (English, Chinese and Chinese Edition)

Hinton, David

Chen, Yanbing

New poetry by the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet-in-exile. Bei Dao, the internationally acclaimed Chinese poet, has been the poetic conscience of the dissident movements in his country for over twenty years. He has been in exile since the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Unlock presents forty-nine new poems written in the United States, and may well be Bei Dao's most powerful work to date. Complex, full of startling and sometimes surreal imagery, sudden transitions, and oblique political references, and often embedding bits of bureaucratic speech and unexpected slang, his poetry has been compared to that of Paul Celan and Cesar Vallejo: poets who invented a new poetry and a new language in the attempt to speak of the enormity of their times. The sixth book of Bei Dao's work published by New Directions, Unlock has been translated by Eliot Weinberger, the distinguished essayist and critically acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges, in collaboration with the historian Iona Man-Cheong and the poet himself.

Unlock

Beidao

Man-Cheong, Iona

At the Sky's Edge combines in a single bilingual paperback volume two essential works by one of the world's finest contemporary poets. In his first retrospective volume of poetry in English, two of Bei Dao's previous booksForms of Distance (1994) and Landscape Over Zero (1996)are gathered together in one bilingual paperback edition. At The Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996 marks a pivotal point in the poet's oeuvre, presenting the increasingly lyrical, meditative poems written in the years following his banishment from China in 1989. Translated into twenty-five languages, Bei Dao's work has long been appreciated internationally, but is just recently gaining a larger audience in the US. At The Sky's Edge becomes Bei Dao's seventh book published by New Directions and is the first time Forms of Distance appears in a paperback edition. The translations of David Hinton, who was awarded the prestigious Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from The Academy of American Poets in 1997, capture both the musicality and density of the original Chinese. Quiet, spare, these are poems of paradox and possibility, of words carefully balanced, of a world on edge.

At the Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dao, Bei. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dao, Bei