Pushing literary boundaries…
(Buy The Magician of 1919 on Amazon U.S. / Buy The Magician of 1919 on Amazon U.K. )
Novelist and short story writer Li Er (李洱) was born 1966 in Henan Province. He has published five story collections, two novels and approximately 50 novellas and short stories – most of them within the last decade. Li Er’s work appears regularly in Zuojia, Shouhuo, Huacheng, Shucheng, Dajia, Renmin Wenxue, Shanhua, Shidai Wenxue and a variety of other mainland literary journals.
Li Er is regarded as an innovative writer because of his experiments with narrative form. He is widely respected in Chinese literary circles and has acquired a passionate fan base of highly literate and intellectual readers. Li Er has also attracted a great deal of attention among literary critics inside and outside China as one of China’s most influential contemporary writers. The South China Morning Post wrote: ”he manages to artfully act within “the system” while still pushing literary boundaries in his writing.”
“Anyone who can change the course of history is a magician.” Li Er.
In September 2011, Make-Do Studios published an English version of ‘The Magician of 1919′, translated by Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan. The Magician of 1919 was eagerly awaited as the first of Li Er’s works to be published in English and the translation highlighted his status as one of China’s most innovative writers.
In 1919, the year of the May 4th movement in China, magician Bigshot Cowrie arrives in Peking. He has with him a budgerigar, which is a language genius, a hat with a magical long queue and some pigeons. During his time in Peking, he encounters various figures, fictional and historical, and becomes involved in important events in modern Chinese history.
The new book was published under Make-Do’s ‘Modern Chinese Masters’ imprint, the purpose of which is to surprise and challenge preconceptions about Chinese fiction.
“This groundbreaking imprint of new Chinese fiction in English.” The Beijinger.
The Magician of 1919 is full of charming descriptions of Beijing street theatre in the early twentieth century and beautifully evokes an exotic, bygone era . The story is rich with colourful adventures and characters, such as Bigshot Cowrie the magician, who wins a job as a librarian at Beijing University, the same position occupied by the young Chairman Mao in 1918-1919 . The Magician of 1919 also contains a unique take on the May 4th 1919 movement, a critical and still controversial moment in modern Chinese history.
Most authors, you’d think, would be excited on the eve of their English language debut, especially after 20 years of waiting. But Li Er is not like most authors. To begin with, he writes about magicians and bowel movements in his tales about the moral decline of modern China.
South China Morning Post review
In Li Er’s short story Christmas Eve, a retired schoolteacher mourns the death of his daughter while simultaneously pimping young girls to an infamous nightclub-cum-brothel.
My father did not want me to become a writer,” Li remembers. “He thought it was a dangerous job in China because you risked unknowingly making some political mistakes in your writing.”