ORDINARY LIVES, POWERFUL TALES

Sheng Keyi, Kaitlin Solimine, Hou Lei

moderated by Bradford Philen

Saturday, March 24, 2 pm

Three cutting-edge novelists will discuss how they put ordinary lives under a magnifying glass and take the personalities, experiences, aspirations and disappointments they see and meld them in experimental and creative ways into stories with universal reach. In the coming-of-age novel Northern Girls, Sheng Keyi explores the inner lives of a generation of young, rural Chinese women who embark on life-changing journeys in search of a better life. And in her daring piece of allegorical, speculative fiction Death Fugue, she tells of how the local population in a Chinese city become unnerved when a huge tower of excrement appears in the main square one day. Kaitlin Solimine’s Empire of Glass is a grand, experimental epic where the narrator’s story is told in footnotes that run throughout the book which chronicles the seismic changes in China over the last half century through the lens of one family’s experiences. While Hou Lei’s latest collection of short stories, Man Under the Ice, focusses on the contemporary lives of the working class in Beijing and shows the difficulties and frustrations they face in a time of sweeping social change. This discussion will be moderated by Bradford Philen from International School of Beijing who is the author of the novel Autumn Falls and the short story collection Everything is Insha’Allah.

This event will be consecutively translated in English and Chinese. 

平凡生活与伟大寓言

盛可以，Kaitlin Solimine，侯磊 

主持人 Bradford Philen

3月24日（星期六），下午两点 | 60 RMB | BW24-2

三位前沿小说作家将讨论他们如何将平凡的生活置于放大镜之下，并将他们所观察到的特性、经历、抱负与失落，以充满实验性与创造性的方式，融入具有普遍影响力的故事中去。在成长小说《北妹》中，盛可以探索了年轻一代中国农村妇女的内心生活，她们正在踏上追寻更好的生活的旅程。而在大胆而引人深思的寓言式小说Death Fugue中，她讲述了当一座小山一般的排泄物出现在一个中国城市的主广场时，当地居民如何变得紧张不安。Kaitlin Solimine的Empire of Glass则是一部宏大的实验式史诗巨作，叙事者的故事以脚注的形式贯穿全书，透过一个家庭的经历，记录过去的半个世纪中国发生的巨变。侯磊的最新中短篇小说集《冰下的人》则关注北京当代工人阶级生活，展现了社会变迁中他们的困境与无奈。

此活动现场翻译，中英双语进行。 

Sheng Keyi is a contemporary Chinese novelist, born in a remote village in Yiyang, Hunan. She migrated to Shenzhen in the early 1990s and is currently living in Beijing. Her works include Northern Girls, Death Fugue, Barbaric Growth, and several short story collections. Her works have been translated into English, Italian, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. She was the winner of the Chinese People’s Literature Prize, the Yu Dafu Prize for Fiction, the Chinese Literature Media Award, the Top 20 Novelists of the Future Prize. Northern Girls, published by Penguin Books in 2012, was long listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her works depict the real lives of China’s poor, the survival of its women, and situations revolving around the human spirit, written in language that is violent, enthusiastic, and experimental.

盛可以，上世纪七十年代生于湖南省益阳市。九十年代移居深圳。著有《北妹》、《死亡赋格》《野蛮生长》等七部长篇小说及多部中短篇小说集。作品被译成英，德，法，意、日、韩、西班牙多种语言出版。曾获华语文学传媒大奖、郁达夫小说奖，人民文学奖，未来文学大家 TOP20等。2012年英文版的《北妹》入围英仕曼亚州国际文学奖。其作品语言风格猛烈，热衷声音实验，以敏锐观察和冷酷书写而著称。

Hou Lei, a Beijinger born in 1983, is a writer, poet, and a Kunqu opera performer. He published his first works when he was still in high school, and he has worked as an editor, a teacher and a reporter. He has published an historical fiction novel, and collections of short stories and essays, and his creative writing and literary history columns have appeared in several journals and widely online. In 2017, he released his collection of short stories called Man Under the Ice, which focusses on the contemporary lives of the working class in Beijing and shows the difficulties and frustrations they face in a time of sweeping social change.  

侯磊，北京人，青年作家、诗人、昆曲曲友。著有长篇小说《还阳》，中短篇小说集《冰下的人》《燕都怪谈》，文史随笔《旧京声色》《唐诗中的大唐》、《宋词中的大宋》、《三生有性》等。热衷于北京史地民俗、碑铭掌故的研究，为众多学校讲述《北京传统文化》、《写作》、《论语》等方面的讲座，微信十万加文章《从前，北京是个养穷人的地方》等。

Bradford Philen is the author of the novel Autumn Falls and the short story collection Everything is Insha'Allah. An MFA candidate with the University of Alaska at Anchorage, Bradford also contributes as editor for the local Spittoon Magazine and teaches high school English at the International School of Beijing. A full list of his publications can be found at bradfordphilen.com.