bookshelves: currently-reading
]]>
bookshelves: currently-reading
]]>
]]>
Naomi
said "yes" to attending the event: Chistmas Food Lovely nice meeting.
date: December 07, 2009 08:00PM
location: MoYa, Ireland
description: Yay!
]]>
]]>
bookshelves: to-read
]]>
"Funny, childlike and wise all at once."
—Los Angeles Times
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang, the daughter of shoe factory owners in rural China, has come to London to study English. She calls herself Z because English people can’t pronounce her name, but she’s no better at their language. Set loose to find her way through a confusion of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps, she winds up lodging with a Chinese family and thinks she might as well not have left home. But then she meets an English man who changes everything. From the moment he smiles at her, she enters a new world of sex, freedom, and self-discovery. But she also realizes that, in the West, “love” does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover.
Drawing on her diaries from when she first arrived in the UK, Xiaolu Guo winningly writes the story in steadily improving English grammar and vocabulary. Freshly humorous, sexy, and poignant, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is an utterly original novel about language, identity, and the cultural divide.
SUGGESTED READING
Mark Dunn, Ella Minnow Pea; Marina Lewycka, A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian; Jennifer Egan, The Invisible Circus; Gish Jen, Typical American; Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Xiaolu Guo was born in the Zhe Jiang province of southern China. After graduating from the Beijing Film Academy, she wrote several books published in China.
She has written and directed award-winning documentaries, including The Concrete Revolution; her first feature film, How Is Your Fish Today?, was an Official Selection at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 International Women's Film Festival.
Since 2002 she has been dividing her time between London and Beijing. ]]>
yay! ]]>