This volume consists of translations of twenty-four fictional works and five essays by Wang Wen-Hsing, plus a dedicated author's preface.  Wang is one of the most celebrated modernist writers in Taiwan and the recipient of Taiwan's most prestigious National Culture and Arts Award (Literature Category).  This anthology brings to English readers excellent works written in the earlier period of Wang's writing career; most of the works are published for the first time in English.  This book is an important introduction not only toward understanding Wang's writings in particular, but also to understanding Taiwan modernist literature in general.

Single Sickness and Other Stories by Masuda Mizuko opens a window onto the intriguing fictional world of award-winning author Masuda Mizuko. Masuda explores themes of female subjectivity and biology, selfhood and autonomy, loneliness and desire, and the deep tensions inherent in female-male relations. The seven stories in this volume tap into a powerful undercurrent of disquiet pervading contemporary urban life. Masuda subtly evokes an air of menace underlying the mundane and a whiff of danger in the domestic.

Known in the West primarily through poorly subtitled films, Chinese martial arts fiction is one of the most iconic and yet the most understudied form of modern sinophone creativity. Current scholarship on the subject is characterized by three central assumptions that I will argue against in this book: first, that martial arts fiction is the representation of a bodily spectacle that historically originated in Hong Kong cinema; second, that the genre came into being as an escapist fantasy that provided psychological comfort to people during the height of imperialism; and third, that martial arts fiction reflects a patriotic attitude that celebrates the greatness of Chinese culture, which in turn is variously described as the China-complex, colonial modernity, essentialized identity, diasporic consciousness, anxieties about globalization, or other psychological and ideological difficulties experienced by the Chinese people.