A surreal, fantastic coming-of-age novel blending Eastern and Western beliefs, from the winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award.

Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind gam...

This book provides a comprehensive review on tensor algebra, including tensor products, tensor unfolding, tensor eigenvalues, and tensor decompositions. Tensors are multidimensional arrays generalized from vectors and matrices, which can capture higher-order interactions within multiway data. In addition, tensors have wide applications in many domains such as signal processing, machine learning, and data analysis, and the author explores the role of tensors/tensor algebra in tensor-based d...

Food and the systems that produce, disrupt, prepare it are central to all human life. Yet, scholarly analysis of the food systems that support human life are highly fragmented across a variety of disciplines. Public administration, with its focus on the doing of public policy, would seem to be a logical home for analysis of food systems in action. However, food is largely ignored by public administration scholars, and scholars from other disciplines can unintentionally draw up established ...

Infrastructure is the foundation of modern economies. A robust, efficient, and well-maintained infrastructure system is critical to support the nation’s economy, improve quality of life, and strengthen global competitiveness. The serious infrastructure deficit in the U.S. is well-known. State and local governments are struggling to finance the needed expansion, upgrades, and repairs. Meeting the infrastructure financing challenge has emerged as one of the most urgent issues facing the coun...

The essays in this volume address the displacement of natural and cultural heritage caused by disasters, whether they be dramatic natural impacts or terrible events unleashed by humankind, including holocaust and genocide. Disasters can be natural or human-made, rapid or slow, great or small, yet the impact is effectively the same; nature, people and cultural heritage are displaced or lost. Yet while heritage and place are at risk from disasters, in time,sites of suffering are sometimes re...

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIn Mother River, Can Xue, one of China’s most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence.Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries betwen ...

Thirteen dreamy stories from one of China's most innovative writers.

A profound, poignant story of a village healer and her community, from one of the world’s great contemporary novelists“A complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China . . . [that] offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life.”—Publishers Weekly“A barefoot doctor herself, [Can Xue] has a unique and powerful way of transporting readers to new worlds where reality and mag...

A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literatureCan Xue’s stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor.Combining elements of both Chinese materiality—the love of physical things—and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue i...

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIn Mother River, Can Xue, one of China's most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence.Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries betwee...

New Novel from the Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardFrontier opens with the story of Liujin, a young woman heading out on her own to create her own life in Pebble Town, a somewhat surreal place at the base of Snow Mountain where wolves roam the streets and certain enlightened individuals can see and enter a paradisaical garden.Exploring life in this city (or in the frontier) through the viewpoint of a dozen different characters, some si...