A01=Chiang-Sheng Kuo
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Author_Chiang-Sheng Kuo
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award-winniing
award-winning fiction
B06=Howard Goldblatt
B06=Sylvia Li-chun Lin
betrayal in fiction
broken dreams
Category1=Fiction
Category=FR
Category=FYT
classical music
confession
COP=United States
dashed dreams
death in venice
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fiction from CHina
fiction from Taiwan
Glenn Gould
heartbreak
in translation
Ishiguro
Language_English
love and grief
love and loss
love story
murakami
music in fiction
new Asian fiction
novel
novel about grief
novel about grieving
novel about loneliness
novel of love and grief
novella
novels about broken dreans
novels about self-discovery
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piano
poignant love stories
Price_€20 to €50
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Rachmaninofff
Richter
Schubert
self-discovery
self-discovery exploration
snow country
softlaunch
Steinway
Taiwan
the dwarf
unreliable narrator
unrequited love
Product details
- ISBN 9781956763416
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 02 Mar 2023
- Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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This bestseller and winner of every major literary award in Taiwan is an elegiac novel about love and loss, broken dreams and desolate hearts—and music: "A delightful read."—Ha Jin
A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei’s red-light district to snow-clad New York.
At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. But he was once a musical prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness?
Long hailed in Taiwan as a “writer’s writer,” Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. It’s a book of sounds: both of music and of the heart, from Rachmaninoff to Schubert, from Glenn Gould to Sviatoslav Richter, from untapped potential to unrequited love. With a cadence and precision that bring to mind Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, this short novel may be a portrait of the artist as a “failure,” but it also describes a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love.
A widower grieving for his young wife. A piano tuner concealing a lifetime of secrets. An out-of-tune Steinway piano. A journey of self-discovery across time and continents, from a dark apartment in Taipei’s red-light district to snow-clad New York.
At the heart of the story is the nameless narrator, the piano tuner. In his forties, he is balding and ugly, a loser by any standard. But he was once a musical prodigy. What betrayal and what heartbreak made him walk away from greatness?
Long hailed in Taiwan as a “writer’s writer,” Chiang-Sheng Kuo delivers a stunningly powerful, compact novel in The Piano Tuner. It’s a book of sounds: both of music and of the heart, from Rachmaninoff to Schubert, from Glenn Gould to Sviatoslav Richter, from untapped potential to unrequited love. With a cadence and precision that bring to mind Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, and Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, this short novel may be a portrait of the artist as a “failure,” but it also describes a pursuit of the ultimate beauty in music and in love.
Chiang-Sheng Kuo (郭強生) is one of the most exciting storytellers and prose stylists in Taiwanese literature today, He has written a number of novels, essay collections, and plays, of which The Piano Tuner is the first to be published in English. The Piano Tuner was a bestseller and swept every major literary award in Taiwan, including the 2021 United Daily Literature Award, 2020 Taiwan Literature Golden Award, and 2020 Openbook Book of the Year Award as well as other honors. Chiang-Sheng Kuo earned a PhD in drama from New York University and teaches in the Department of Language and Creative Writing at National Taipei University of Education. He lives in Taipei.
Howard Goldblatt translates Chinese fiction from China and Taiwan, including Nobel Prize–winner Mo Yan, five of whose works are published by Arcade (The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine; Big Breasts and Wide Hips; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out; Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh). He has also translated works by Chiang-Sheng Kuo (The Piano Tuner) and Liu Zhenyun (I Did Not Kill My Husband; The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon; Remembering 1942, all with Sylvia Li-chun Lin and published by Arcade). He taught Chinese literature and culture for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.
Sylvia Li-chun Lin, a former teacher and scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, is a full-time translator and writer. She and Howard Goldblatt live in Lafayette, Colorado, with their demonic cat, Domino.
Howard Goldblatt translates Chinese fiction from China and Taiwan, including Nobel Prize–winner Mo Yan, five of whose works are published by Arcade (The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine; Big Breasts and Wide Hips; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out; Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh). He has also translated works by Chiang-Sheng Kuo (The Piano Tuner) and Liu Zhenyun (I Did Not Kill My Husband; The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon; Remembering 1942, all with Sylvia Li-chun Lin and published by Arcade). He taught Chinese literature and culture for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.
Sylvia Li-chun Lin, a former teacher and scholar of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, is a full-time translator and writer. She and Howard Goldblatt live in Lafayette, Colorado, with their demonic cat, Domino.
