Shen Congwen Border Town Reading Order

Shen Congwen's Border Town (1934) is one of the most beloved short novels in Chinese literature — a pastoral elegy set in the small river town of Chadong in Hunan province, following the gentle, dreamy boatman's granddaughter Cuicui as she falls in love and faces the loss that comes with it. Shen Congwen wrote the novel as a deliberate act of nostalgia and preservation: the Xiangxi (western Hunan) river culture he had grown up in was disappearing, and he wanted to capture its beauty, its simplicity, and its particular human type before they vanished. The result is a novel of extraordinary lyrical delicacy, suffused with a melancholy that is all the more powerful for never becoming explicit. Shen Congwen was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988 — the year the award went to Naguib Mahfouz — and is thought to have been the intended recipient. He died that same year before the announcement.