{"id":12956,"date":"2014-05-28T00:01:27","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T04:01:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=12956"},"modified":"2014-05-27T15:12:35","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T19:12:35","slug":"last-words-from-montmartre-giveaway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2014\/05\/28\/last-words-from-montmartre-giveaway\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Words from Montmartre Giveaway!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This coming Tuesday, NYRB Classics will be publishing Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre<\/em>, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich. I’ll be posting more on this sad, powerful book next week, but as it turns out I have an extra copy to giveaway. I’ll leave you with the cover and the publisher’s blurb.<\/p>\n

\"Last<\/p>\n

When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre<\/i>. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words<\/i> tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women — their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu\u2019s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author\u2019s own suicide note.<\/span><\/p>\n

The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders — until the genderless character Zo\u00eb appears, and the narrator\u2019s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima\u2019s Confessions of a Mask<\/i>, Goethe\u2019s The Sorrows of Young Werther<\/i>, and Theresa Cha\u2019s Dict\u00e9e<\/i>, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre<\/i> proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Please enter the giveaway by filling out the form below. You can enter once per day until next Tuesday, when the winner will be selected.<\/p>\n

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