I Love Dollars: Finalist for the Kiriyama Prize

I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China by Zhu Wen and translated by Julia Lovell was selected as a finalist for The Kiriyama Prize in the fiction category. The other finalists are Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (The Dial Press), The Complete Stories by David Malouf (Knopf), The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (Houghton Mifflin), and Mosquito by Roma Tearne (Europa Editions).

From the Judges’ Citation:

Zhu Wen’s extraordinary “new urbanite” stories, superbly translated by Julia Lovell, portray contemporary China as a country where political and social pressures have resulted in hedonism, rootlessness, and soul-deadening nihilism. With the painful humor and the devastating detachment of a Kafka or Borges, the author renders the struggle for survival and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing and bureaucratic society. In I Love Dollars, Zhu Wen, whose work has long been published in the most prestigious literary magazines in China but was never before available in translation, has gifted us with his darkly comic view of the underbelly of the New China. Read more…

Read an excerpt from I Love Dollars (pdf). For more on Columbia’s series Weatherhead Books on Asia and for a complete listing of our Asian literature titles.

The Kiriyama Prize was established in 1996 to recognize outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia that encourage greater mutual understanding of and among the peoples and nations of this vast and culturally diverse region. The winner will be announced on April 1, so stay tuned for more news.