Taipei People

Book excerpt: Literary critics such as C. T. Hsia called Pai Hsienyung a "rare talent" who according to another critic, "has absorbed the diverse techniques of contemporary Western literature to temper and modernize his writing; however, the characters he writes about remain Chinese people and the stories he tells remain Chinese tales." Widely acclaimed as a classic of contemporary fiction, Taipei People has been frequently compared to James Joyce's Dubliners. Henry Miller considers Pai Hsienyung "a master of portraiture." The collection of fourteen stories from this reprint edition has already been translated to great acclaim into French, German, Italian, Dutch, Hebrew, Japanese, and Korean.