Book Review: China's Lost Modernist

The inventive stylings of avant-garde writer Mu Shiying translated by Andrew David Field offer a view into the cultural sediment of Republican China. Assassinated in 1940, the short stories of Mu represent the flowering of urbanism in China anchored in a dichotomy of tradition and modernity. Mu's fiction offers a picture of the early cosmopolitanism in Shanghai and its place in modern Chinese literature.