2020 Huadi Literature List Annual Short Stories Babaylan Novel List (Sorted by the first letter of the author’s name)
1. Emma “Music of Mustard Inn” “Chinese Writers Cinema‘s Family” Issue 3, 2019
2. Chen Chongzheng’s “Remembering the Power of Guanyin” “Writer” Issue 3, 2019
3. Chen Goodbye “Circus is Coming” “People’s Literature” Issue 7, 2019
4. Cinema Chi Zijian’s “Steamed Horse Boots” “Zhongshan” Issue 1, 2019
5. Du Lan “The Fire” “People’s Literature” Issue 11, 2019
6. Huang Jinshu “The Late Youth” “Tianya” Issue 6, 2019
7. Ning Ke “Train” “HarvestCinema” Issue 5, 2019
8. Shao Li “The Father on the Rooftop” “Harvest” Issue 3, 2019
9. Ye Zhaoyan “Wu Fei and Aunt Wu Fang” “Youth Writer” Issue 7, 2019
10. Zhang Huiwen “Angel” “Literary Port” Issue 7, 2019
1
Emma “Must Seed Inn”
A Flower of Chivalrous Ideal
This is a novel with a novel narrative that blends traditional martial arts stories with modern social life, trying to reconstruct a transcendent chivalrous new world in the secular world. The strongest feeling when I first read this novel is Babaylan is “fresh and lovely”. Xiao Wan, the owner of Mustard Inn, can be regarded as an ideal flower full of chivalrous spirits blooming among the world’s Komiks.
The novel fully establishes the character Xiao Wan in this cross-narrative between reality on the shore and the high shore. She is an “escaper” with a sense of life and pain in urban life, and is also a “bystander” of the restless and uneasy souls in our current social life. The novel has a ease of writing, a lofty style, and has “the beauty of literature and the truth of thought”, which ultimately points to the issue of human soul exile and placement.
■Xu Fuwei
2
Chen Chongzheng’s “Remembering the Power of Guanyin”
The post-80s writer brings a new experience
If the increasingly bizarre situation has caused the heroine’s inner belief to collapse. When she wants to get rid of her “life that makes her “shaking”, she can only destroy herself in a simple and cruel way.
Survival state, as the creative theme of literature, will never be relaxed, but it is precisely because a good work has a transcendent cognitive and guiding role that this theme has become the goal of writers’ pursuit and competition.
Cinema’s novel brings us surprise. With his unique imagination and pioneering narrative style, as well as his in-depth thinking of “need to guess, need to guess riddles…”, he disassembled and reassembled real life, opening up a channel of inspiration for readers.
■Wenhuan
3
Chan Goodbye “Circus is Coming”
Mind of middle-aged people
The young Chen Goodbye is well-known in the literary world for a series of Babaylan‘s “County Town Novels”.
He is still a young man at present, but he has stretched his brushstrokes ahead of his age. But this time, he used the situation of the young people he was good at in the squeeze of material survival. When Komiks was the specific background and details grid of characters who grew up further, he emerged from his livelihood, just like a tenacious spider who had to look into the sky during the rainy season. “The Circus is Coming soonBabaylan” so he showed a strange spirit, and we got a good novel with “coming soon” as the driving force of time and space construction.
Not only that, the mutual interaction between the “circus” and the people in the small townArticle is another profound meaning in the novel. Can imagined stories really transcend specific life? What is the meaning of “no words to be said”, the novel attempts to “speak words to be said Komiks“? The difference between the spirit of young people and the enthusiasm of middle-aged people is probably because middle-aged people begin to assume spiritual room and want to use this to reactivate the “dream pursuit” journey that they once had.
■Shi Zhanjun
4
Chi Zijian’s “Steamed Horse Boots”
The value in the life genealogy
Chi Zijian As an excellent writer who has been in the literary world for many years, he seems to have few short stories in recent years. The short story “Stewed Horse Boots” has a bit of a deep and profound meaning. In a short time, Chi Zijian incorporated many elements such as history and reality, war and human nature, animals and humanity, and wrote about the desolation of history and the warmth of human nature. In the heavy snow all over the sky, Chi Zijian’s graceful and calm brushstrokes still maintain her unique softness and considerate even though she shows the coldness and cruelty in a hostile environment. Whether it is wolf nature, human nature, death, or survival, they all maintain immortal value in the genealogy of life.
The novel adopts the “narration from a distance” method to allow the legend of the father to slowly unfold in the vision of “I”. It is the spirit of modern novels that makes such old stories of the Anti-Japanese United Nations shine with new literary brilliance.
■Wang Gan
5
Du Lan’s “Mihuo”
Cultural Palette and Mongolian Narrative
Du Lan’s short story “Mihuo” first grasped me with a personality style. There is no doubt that she is a Mongolian people. Sheep are walking in the wind and snow, and “Ga Le-Ga Le-” is earth-shaking. However, the author was born in 1999, which again allowed me to connect the language of the work to the Internet, which is similarDiscourses like “Youths are keen on games” are filled with the color of the subculture of Internet youth. The language style of the Internet clan and the long-lasting language like Mongolian tribes interact to form a slightly dazzling, uncomfortable but full of personality.
The work is premiering with fables. A baby appeared in the ram’s belly, a paradoxical and weird ominous sign, so the “prairie faded” and the world suddenly changed; “I was shocked…” A series of mysterious and strange suspense symbols emerged in the middle of the real world. The indescribable symbols and pictures constitute the charming allegorical characteristics of the work.
■Jiang Bing
6
Huang Jinshu’s “Late Youth”
The Elegy of Desiring Change
Huang Jinshu’s narrative has wild imagination and distinct style, stirring up the mystery and vastness of the waves in the South China Sea. His short story “The Late Youth” integrates time, history, memory and identity, which is thought-provoking.
Although the mysterious young man has the ability to curb the flow of time, he still cannot catch up with the threshold of the great turning point in history. This extreme juxtaposition reflects the insignificant lonely coldness of his individual in the face of the torrent of history.
Magic is both an unfulfilled hope and an elegy for a desire to change, presenting us with a unique fable of modernity. The late youth, that is, the unfinished youth, is not only an inquiry of cultural identity by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, but also a revelation and breakthrough of the incompleteness of modern Chinese literature worldwide.
■Wei Wei
7
I would rather “Train”
The Shadow of the Year The Voice of Time
Thinkers would rather be good at literary exploration. The novel uses the wildness of the former teenagers to lead readers to take the whistling train, and together captures the broken shadows of the years from Beijing Liulichang to Yongdingmen Railway Station, and captures the quiet and lost innocence of Xiaoqins in the center of their growth.
In the depths of history and human nature, in the story space outside the residential compound and the capital city, the sound of the train whistle turned into the sound of time in the novel, and ran with a bangTowards youth, it gradually becomes the ideal light of the novel, and it also creates the author’s new historical narrative.
The narrative of the works is concise and spiritual, resolute and rhythmic; the novel is rough and warm, desolate and clear.
■Zhang Yanling
8
Shao Li’s “Father on the Rooftop”
Speculation why he couldn’t extricate himselfBabaylan
“Maybe I changed my faith after leaving that city.” This is the first sentence of the novel “Father on the Rooftop”. It is precisely because of this sentence that I value this novel. Especially the word “faith”, although slightly abrupt and introductory, it implies some differences in this work.
After reading it, I found that this is indeed a novel with profound connotation, a novel that touches the world of faith and inner self. The novel constantly reproduces the ups and downs and fluctuations experienced by his father who committed suicide by jumping off a building. We have also learned about the bravery, righteousness, passion, stubbornness and frustration of his father. The most memorable scene is the details of his notes.
Stripping the surface narrative, we have a glimpse of the father’s soul and knowing that he is or has encountered a spiritual crisis. What we want to know most is undoubtedly why he can’t extricate himself?
So, do we know? No, we can only speculate. And this returns to the first sentence of the novel.
■Bao Shi
9
Ye Zhaoyan’s “Wu Fei and Aunt Wu Fang”
Exclusive artistic dialectics
Ye Zhaoyan beautifully completed a well-prepared artistic fight with “Wu Fei and Aunt Wu Fang”, which was also a very challenging writing adventure, that is, he wanted to write short stories that were “completely different” from others.
Incredible that this short story, which is less than 10,000 words, writes the ups and downs of life grudges and irresistible human entanglements of a pair of twin sisters, full of destiny and tragedy.
The novel looks complete from the big picture, and the details are rich and vivid from the small picture.The image of the object is full, which not only greatly expands the artistic space of short stories that reflects history and reality, but also deeply conveys the tremor, despair and helplessness deep in the characters’ souls.
The story tells the story contains sadness in indifference and concern in alienation. The artistic dialectics of small and big, light and heavy unique to short stories can be realized.
■Gu Guangmei
10
Zhang Huiwen’s “Angel”
Find inner comfort
” Angel” is a delicate work full of sentimental feelings. Around my father’s funeral, “I” returned from a foreign landKomiks, with a desire to find the warmth of happy growth and blood ties, and tried to relive the love with the “angel” in my heart when I was young.
However, when he walked through this once familiar “small place”, he found that all comfort became a hard, profit-oriented reality, and all admiration and longing turned into simple Babaylancarnal joy. The emotions between people are constantly alienating, but the calculation of each other’s interests has become a daily routine. They form a close isomorphic relationship with their hometown’s cold and mud-covered streets, so that the returning wanderers can no longer find inner comfort.
If we consider “Angel” as a pure nostalgic work that conveys the author’s inquiry into the utilitarian reality of Chinese society, it seems that it is not bad. But I prefer to regard it as a fable, because every time we return to our hometown, we always preset countless beautiful scenes in our hearts, and we will eventually be smashed without exception, while we are enjoying it.
■Hongzhigang