(no subject)
The end of the summer famine. Here's September's new crop of stories and writers.
从北向南From North to South -- Beili, a charming and genial young man, lives with a couple who are seriously into the s/m scene. His friends are certain that Beili is a bottom in search of the right top, in spite of Beili's protestations to the contrary, and one day persuaded him to give it a try. They did not quite succeed in converting him, but Beili in his untrained enthusiasm did manage to break their imported and extremely expensive gear in the process. Thus begins a very entertaining romp as Beili embarks on a search to replace his friends' precious bondage gear. Usually s/m stories do nothing for me. They're always so deadly earnest, and can make even the most erotic act sound deadly dull. But North & South is very different from the usual run of s/m stories. It pokes fun at the conventions of that peculiar world even as it retains the erotic energy that attracts people to it in the first place. And Beili is certainly one of the most delightful character I've ever come across.
月迷津渡 Historical court drama, about a doctor of the imperial court who is turned into the plaything by the emperor. Any plot summary I can give will make it sound like the most cliched of stories, but like most Chinese novels, it's not the story that matters, but how it's told. This one is compulsively readable, written in beautiful and eloquent language, without any of the stilted writing that often plagues such stories.
西北有高樓 Got this rec off shalimar1001. Set in the early Republic of China, the story of a Chinese opera singer and his family. Generally this is a rather problematic period -- such stories inevitably call for comparison with Farewell my Concubine, and with rare exceptions the story always come off worse. But this is the new serialization by the author of Motivation for Murder, which was a very good mystery, so it'll be interesting to see which she does with such a different time period and genre.
从北向南From North to South -- Beili, a charming and genial young man, lives with a couple who are seriously into the s/m scene. His friends are certain that Beili is a bottom in search of the right top, in spite of Beili's protestations to the contrary, and one day persuaded him to give it a try. They did not quite succeed in converting him, but Beili in his untrained enthusiasm did manage to break their imported and extremely expensive gear in the process. Thus begins a very entertaining romp as Beili embarks on a search to replace his friends' precious bondage gear. Usually s/m stories do nothing for me. They're always so deadly earnest, and can make even the most erotic act sound deadly dull. But North & South is very different from the usual run of s/m stories. It pokes fun at the conventions of that peculiar world even as it retains the erotic energy that attracts people to it in the first place. And Beili is certainly one of the most delightful character I've ever come across.
月迷津渡 Historical court drama, about a doctor of the imperial court who is turned into the plaything by the emperor. Any plot summary I can give will make it sound like the most cliched of stories, but like most Chinese novels, it's not the story that matters, but how it's told. This one is compulsively readable, written in beautiful and eloquent language, without any of the stilted writing that often plagues such stories.
西北有高樓 Got this rec off shalimar1001. Set in the early Republic of China, the story of a Chinese opera singer and his family. Generally this is a rather problematic period -- such stories inevitably call for comparison with Farewell my Concubine, and with rare exceptions the story always come off worse. But this is the new serialization by the author of Motivation for Murder, which was a very good mystery, so it'll be interesting to see which she does with such a different time period and genre.