Flock of Brown Birds

In this avant garde masterpiece, memory is a fluid concept. The protagonist, a writer, is at a publisher-sponsored retreat to finish his novel. The beauty of the location however cannot compensate for the anxiety and hallucinations he experiences while watching a flock of brown birds pass by his window, and his sense of temporal disorientation is further compounded by the appearance of a strange woman who calls him Ge Fei. Fiction and reality blend into one as the story unfolds. Ge Fei’s prose renders in exquisite detail the fragility of time.

Ge Fei is one of China’s foremost writers of experimental fiction and currently serves as Professor of Literature at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Frequently referred to as the "Chinese Borges," he is considered to be a founder of the 1980s era of literary and artistic revival. He is the fiction winner of the 2014 Lu Xun Literary Prize and 2015 Mao Dun Literary Prize.