AN EMPTY ROOM

A cycle of 13 tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, AN EMPTY ROOM is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingway's In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata's palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin's wandering interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An EMPTY ROOM is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss and humanity regained.

Born in 1927 in the south of China, Mu Xin is the author of 20 collections of stories, poetry and essays and an internationally renowned painter. During the Cultural Revolution, he was imprisoned for 18 months and then lived under house arrest for several years. Much of his work - paintings and manuscripts - were destroyed. In 1982, he moved to the US, where he lived in Queens, New York, until 2006. He now lives in his hometown, Wuzhen, in the Zhejiang Province in China.