Love in a Fallen City
Translated by Karen S. Kingsbury
About
In these stories set in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong, love is never simple and rarely kind. Eileen Chang's characters — wives negotiating loveless marriages, young women calculating their romantic options with the precision of accountants, men who confuse possession with affection — move through a world where the old social order is collapsing and nothing reliable has replaced it. Chang writes about desire the way other writers write about war: as a force that rearranges everything it touches and leaves survivors picking through the wreckage. The definitive collection from the writer who understood better than anyone that in a falling city, love is just another form of negotiation.
