Bøker i Hong Kong Literature (Col)-serien

For several decades Xi Xi has been widely known for her award-winning poetry and fiction. This time, she has chosen to write about the teddy bears she began making in 2005, after treatment for cancer, in order to improve the mobility of her right hand. The book offers fascinating insights into Chinese culture.

One of the first full-length stream-of-consciousness novels written in Chinese, The Drunkard has been called the Hong Kong novel, and was first published in 1962. As the narrator, a writer at odds with a philistine world, sinks to his drunken nadir, his plight can be seen to represent that of a whole culture degraded by the forces of history.

Leung Ping-kwan brought as much talent and inspiration to the writing of his short stories as he did to his poems. Through the keen eyes and curious mind of a young girl, Ying-tzu, we are given a glimpse into the adult world of Peking in the 1920s.

The memoir Ordinary Days by the scholar and critic Leo Ou-fan Lee and his wife Esther Lee Yuk Ying brings to this Hong Kong series an intensely personal touch, consciously echoing the great sentimental memoir of the eighteenth century, Shen Fu's Six Chapters of a Floating Life.

An anthology of essays from Hong Kong and the diaspora, ranging across the past hundred and seventy years, that record the intellectual ferment that has characterised the city since its founding in 1842, sometimes restless and questioning, sometimes meditative and lyrical, always civilised, and buoyed by an all-pervasive spirit of freedom.