Becoming a minor celebrity when her photograph appears on the cover of Shanghai Life magazine and winning second-runner up in a beauty pageant, Wang Qiyao becomes a mistress to a wealthy benefactor, but after his death, she begins a lonely fall into anonymity.

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao, a girl born of the crowded, labyrinthine alleys of Shanghai's working-class neighborhoods. Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood, Wang Qiyao seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, and this fleeting moment of stardom becomes the pinnacle of her life. After the Communist victory, Wang Qiyao continues to indulge in the decadent pleasures of the Shanghai bourgeoisie, secretly playing mahjong during the antirightist campaign and exchanging lovers on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. She reemerges in the 1980s as a purveyor of "old Shanghai," only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the Hollywood noirs of her youth.

From the universally admired, National Book Award-winning, bestselling author of Waiting—a timely novel that follows a famous Chinese singer severed from his country, as he works to find his way in the United States At the end of a U.S. tour with his state-supported choir, popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York to pick up some extra cash for his daughter’s tuition fund, but the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. On his return to China, Tian is informed that the sponsors of the event were supporters of Taiwan’s secession, and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, Tian impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government’s threat to his artistic integrity. With the help of his old friend Yabin, Tian’s career begins to flourish in the United States. But he is soon placed on a Chinese gov­ernment blacklist and thwarted by the state at every turn, and it becomes increasingly clear that he may never return to China unless he denounces the freedoms that have made his new life possible. Tian nevertheless insists on his identity as a performer, refusing to give up his art. Moving, important, and strikingly relevant to our times, A Song Everlasting is a story of hope in the face of hardship from one of our most celebrated authors.

The play recounts the love story of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang and his favorite consort, Yang Guifei. Though based on a large body of earlier literature and legend, it is unique in its overall form and lyric exposition.

This “blistering satire” of modern China was a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and a New York Times Editor’s Choice novel (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Lenin’s Kisses is set in modern day China, in the village of Liven. Nestled within the Balou Mountains, the people have enough food and leisure to be content—until their crops and livelihood are obliterated by a snowstorm in the middle of summer. Then a county official arrives with a peculiar plan. He wants to use the villagers to start a traveling performance troupe. Next, he’ll take the profits and buy Lenin’s embalmed corpse from Russia and install it in a mausoleum to attract tourism. But the success of the Shuanghuai County Special-Skills Performance Troupe comes at a serious price. Named a finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, Lenin’s Kisses is “a satirical masterpiece” (Kirkus) that was on Best Book of 2012 lists from the New Yorker, MacLeans, and Kirkus, and was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

From one of China’s most acclaimed writers: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades. Framed by ten phrases common in the Chinese vernacular, China in Ten Words uses personal stories and astute analysis to reveal as never before the world’s most populous yet oft-misunderstood nation. In "Disparity," for example, Yu Hua illustrates the expanding gaps that separate citizens of the country. In "Copycat," he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in "Bamboozle," he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society. Witty, insightful, and courageous, this is a refreshingly candid vision of the "Chinese miracle" and all of its consequences.

Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores the residential lanes and courtyards behind Shanghai’s busy shopping streets, the less she wants to return to the country as a dutiful wife. As Fu Ping wavers over her future, she learns the city through the stories of the nannies, handymen, and garbage collectors whose labor is bringing life and bustle back to postwar Shanghai. Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary China’s most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban life. In shifting perspectives rich in detail and psychological insight, she sketches their aspirations, their fears, and the subtle ties that bind them together. In Howard Goldblatt’s masterful translation, Fu Ping reveals Wang Anyi’s precise renderings of history, class, and the human heart.