Basic Beauty

★Zhou Jianing's short story transformation masterpiece, jointly recommended by Liang Wendao, Lu Nei, Zhang Yueran, etc. ★Striving to resist the century of nothingness, the remarkable young people jointly call for the next golden age [Book Highlights]
① Zhou Jianing's short story transformation masterpiece, about cities, youth, future, creation, beauty, and friendship, explores how the times and history affect today's young people in China.
②The value of life is created by people themselves. It is a bright, heroic, utopian portrait of young people: they can clearly position themselves in a chaotic situation, make practical plans in a complex environment, and maintain upward aspirations in the midst of boring noise, ultimately making youth a quality.
③The 97 return parade, the night of the successful bid for the Olympic Games, the Shanghai World Expo, the countryside music festival, popular idols, electronic games... A journey through time from the beginning of the 21st century to the present, in a sinking world, using literature to build a monument to the lives of young people here and now.
【Content Introduction】
What are our ideals and responsibilities?
How do we build our own monuments in a sinking world?
Zhou Jianing's transformative short story masterpiece captures the souls and journeys of the post-80s generation, a journey through the early 21st century, caught between an era about to vanish and one just beginning. From Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong, endearingly ordinary young people breathe and play within the cracks of rules, as if youth could last forever. The narrator weaves through scenes from the Beijing Olympics, rural music festivals, city marathons, and low-resolution video games, weaving once-popular idols and underground youth culture into a capsule of time.
It's like the shock and disorientation of a giant, unnamed animal appearing before your eyes, or the Milky Way overhead while standing in a forest clearing. In "Basic Beauty," Zhou Jianing explores an undefined realm within the spiritual world of millennial intellectuals, using a light, countercurrent language to mark new boundaries between self and others, meaning, and aesthetics.
【Celebrity Recommendation】
Zhou Jianing excels at expressing conflict through slowness and showcasing struggle through tranquility. The entrances to her fiction she seeks are often small, yet they reveal scenery others cannot see. Her elegant and quiet prose is imbued with warmth, energy, and a unique sentiment.
—— Cheng Yongxin From a realistic perspective, Zhou Jianing's novels avoid the drama of life, showing daily worries, difficulties in communication and emotional embarrassment; from a fictional perspective, all realities are absorbed into upward possibilities, as if blending into a clear lake, presenting a basic beauty that moves people's hearts.
Huang Dehai is a writer driven by inner strength, possessing an extremely stubborn weakness. Her novels easily pass readers by. At the time, I felt lost, but later I realized she was actively avoiding it, trying to prevent you from remembering it, or perhaps to allow herself to forget it.
Lu Nei finally found Zhou Jianing. As public discourse gradually fades, this voice is needed to represent this generation. Before they grow old and are abandoned by time, they can leave behind a footprint on the quicksand.
——After reading these novels by Zhou Jianing, Liang Wendao realized that our generation does have something in common: the nihilism of history and the resistance to this nihilism, inexplicable irony and longing, and the repeated entanglement between self and the times... This is the moment when major writing is born.
The novels in Yang Qingxiang's book, with their inherent unity, fully present Zhou Jianing's recent reflections on the powerful resonance between a bygone era and fading youth. Using poetic language, she creates the voice of a quiet, reflective "witness."
——Zhang Yueran

2018-04-01

理想国 | 广西师范大学出版社

Ideal Country

256

9787559807618