Welcome to Malvern Books’ Club: Reading Classics from New York Review Books, hosted this month by Malvern’s Stephen K. Everyone is invited to join us for what we’re sure will be a series of irreverent and insightful conversations.

This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “NYRB Classics book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.

December’s selection is Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei, translated by Canaan Morse.

An enthralling story of revolution, idealism, and a savage struggle for utopia by one of China’s greatest living novelists.

In 1898 reformist intellectuals in China persuaded the young emperor that it was time to transform his sclerotic empire into a prosperous modern state. The Hundred Days’ Reform that followed was a moment of unprecedented change and extraordinary hope–brought to an abrupt end by a bloody military coup. Dashed expectations would contribute to the revolutionary turn that Chinese history would soon take, leading in time to the deaths of millions.

Peach Blossom Paradise, set at the time of the reform, is the story of Xiumi, the daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who falls prey to insanity and disappears. Days later, a man with a gold cicada in his pocket turns up at his estate and is inexplicably welcomed as a relative. This mysterious man has a great vision of reforging China as an egalitarian utopia, and he will stop at nothing to make it real. It is his own plans, however, which come to nothing, and his “little sister” Xiumi is left to take up arms against a Confucian world in which women are chattel. Her campaign for change and her struggle to seize control over her own body are continually threatened by the violent whims of men who claim to be building paradise.

The NYRB Classics series started in 1999 with the publication of Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica and now has over 500 titles in print. NYRB Classics includes new translations of canonical figures such as Euripides, Dante, and Chekhov; fiction by contemporary masters such as Magda Szabó, Tove Jansson, William Gaddis, and Uwe Johnson; tales of crime and punishment by Dorothy B. Hughes and Kenneth Fearing, among others; masterpieces of narrative history, literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, biography, and memoirs from such writers as Eve Babitz, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Charles Simic; and unclassifiable classics on the order of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.

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