Peter Hessler

In the heart of China's Sichuan province lies the small city of Fuling. Surrounded by the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, Fuling has long been a place of continuity, far from the bustling political centers of Beijing and Shanghai. But now Fuling is heading down a new path, and gradually, along with scores of other towns in this vast and ever-evolving country, it is becoming a place of change and vitality, tension and reform, disruption and growth. As the people of Fuling hold on to the China they know, they are also opening up and struggling to adapt to a world in which their fate is uncertain.Fuling's position at the crossroads came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. He found himself teaching English and American literature at the local college, discovering how Shakespeare and other classics look when seen through the eyes of students who have been raised in the Sichuan countryside and educated in Communist Party doctrine. His students, though, are the ones who taught him about the ways of Fuling — and about the complex process of understanding that takes place when one is immersed in a radically different society.As he learns the language and comes to know the people, Hessler begins to see that it is indeed a unique moment for Fuling. In its past is Communist China's troubled history — the struggles of land reform, the decades of misguided economic policies, and the unthinkable damage of the Cultural Revolution — and in the future is the Three Gorges Dam, which upon completion will partly flood thecity and force the resettlement of more than a million people. Making his way in the city and traveling by boat and train throughout Sichuan province and beyond, Hessler offers vivid descriptions of the people he meets, from priests to prostitutes and peasants to professors, and gives voice to their views. This is both an intimate personal story of his life in Fuling and a colorful, beautifully written account of the surrounding landscape and its history. Imaginative, poignant, funny, and utterly compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that, much like China itself, is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.

From the bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China. In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history. Country Driving begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center. Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls "one of the Western world's most thoughtful writers on modern China," deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.

From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world. A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time—the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country—is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China's transformation. Hessler tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In addition to the author, an American writer living in Beijing, the narrative follows Polat, a member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the United States in search of freedom; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family and becomes a teacher; Emily, a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest known writing in East Asia, and a man whose tragic story has been lost since the Cultural Revolution. All are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand. Peter Hessler excavates the past and puts a remarkable human face on the history he uncovers. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

From the acclaimed author of River Town and Oracle Bones, an intimate excavation of life in one of the world's oldest civilizations at a time of convulsive changeDrawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.In the midst of the revolution, Hessler often traveled to digs at Amarna and Abydos, where locals live beside the tombs of kings and courtiers, a landscape that they call simply al-Madfuna "the Buried." He and his wife set out to master Arabic, striking up a friendship with their instructor, a cynical political sophisticate. They also befriended Peter's translator, a gay man struggling to find happiness in Egypt's homophobic culture. A different kind of friendship was formed with the neighborhood garbage collector, an illiterate but highly perceptive man named Sayyid, whose access to the trash of Cairo would be its own kind of archaeological excavation. Hessler also met a family of Chinese small-business owners in the lingerie trade; their view of the country proved a bracing counterpoint to the West's conventional wisdom.Through the lives of these and other ordinary people in a time of tragedy and heartache, and through connections between contemporary Egypt and its ancient past, Hessler creates an astonishing portrait of a country and its people. What emerges is a book of uncompromising intelligence and humanity--the story of a land in which a weak state has collapsed but its underlying society remains in many ways painfully the same. A worthy successor to works like Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, The Buried bids fair to be recognized as one of the great books of our time.

Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage—a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm sense of humor that are the trademarks of his work.Over the last decade, as a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three books, Peter Hessler has lived in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions. This unusual perspective distinguishes Strange Stones, which showcases Hessler’s unmatched range as a storyteller. “Wild Flavor” invites readers along on a taste test between two rat restaurants in South China. One story profiles Yao Ming, basketball star and China’s most beloved export, another David Spindler, an obsessive and passionate historian of the Great Wall. In “Dr. Don,” Hessler writes movingly about a small-town pharmacist and his relationship with the people he serves.While Hessler’s subjects and locations vary, subtle but deeply important thematic links bind these pieces—the strength of local traditions, the surprising overlap between apparently opposing cultures, and the powerful lessons drawn from individuals who straddle different worlds.

An intimate and revelatory eyewitness account of two generations of students in China’s heartland, chronicling a country in the midst of tumultuous change through the prism of its education systemMore than twenty years after teaching English to China’s first boom generation at a small college in Sichuan Province, Peter Hessler returned to Sichuan to teach the next generation. At the same time, Hessler and his wife enrolled their twin daughters in a local state-run elementary school, where they were the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand. Over the years, Hessler had kept in close contact with more than a hundred of his former students, who were now in their forties. By reconnecting with these individuals—members of China’s “Reform generation” —while teaching current undergrads, Hessler was able to gain a unique perspective on China's incredible transformation over the past quarter-century.In the late 1990s, almost all of Hessler's students were the first member of their extended families to become educated. Their parents were subsistence farmers who could offer little guidance as their children entered a brand-new world. By 2019, when Hessler arrived at Sichuan University, he found a very different China and a new kind of student—an only child whose schooling was the object of intense focus from a much more ambitious and sophisticated cohort of parents. Hessler’s new students have a sense of irony about the regime but mostly navigate its restrictions with equanimity, and embrace the astonishing new opportunities China’s boom affords. But the pressures of this system of extreme “meritocracy” at scale can be gruesome, even for much younger children, including his own daughters, who give him and his wife an intimate view into the experience at their local school.In Peter Hessler’s hands, China’s education system is the perfect vehicle for examining what’s happened to the country, where it’s going, and what we can learn from it, for good and ill. At a time when anti-Chinese rhetoric in America has grown blunter and uglier, Other Rivers is a tremendous, indeed an essential gift, a work of enormous human empathy that rejects cheap stereotypes and shows us China from the inside out and the bottom up, using as a measuring stick this most universally relatable set of experiences. As both a window onto China and a distant mirror onto America and its own education system, Other Rivers is a classic, a book of tremendous value and compelling human interest.

何伟写出了我们熟视无暏的中国，边界广阔、引人深思。 编辑推荐 ★一部兼具资料性、可读性、话题性的观察现实中国之作，了解中国文化和社会发展的必读书目。★简洁的线索，丰富的情节，介于新闻、文学之间的流畅笔触，何伟写出了我们熟视无暏的中国，边界广阔、引人深思。 ★特邀何伟笔下真实人物——阿尔伯特原型李雪顺老师担纲翻译，感受中文语言质朴的美感和字里行间永恒的真实。★《纽约时报》《经济学人》《纽约客》《时代周刊》《华尔街日报》《国家地理》《华盛顿邮报》等多家外媒联合推荐。 作者介绍 彼得·海斯勒（Peter Hessler）彼得·海斯勒，中文名何伟，曾任《纽约客》驻北京记者，以及《国家地理》杂志等媒体的撰稿人。他成长于美国密苏里州的哥伦比亚市，在普林斯顿主修英文和写作，并取得牛津大学英语文学硕士学位。海斯勒曾自助旅游欧洲三十国，毕业后更从布拉格出发，由水陆两路横越俄国、中国到泰国，跑完半个地球，也由此开启了他的纪实文学写作之路。海斯勒散见于各大杂志的旅游文学作品，数度获得美国最佳旅游写作奖。他的中国纪实三部曲中，《江城》一经推出即获得“奇里雅玛环太平洋图书奖”，《甲骨文》则荣获《时代周刊》年度最佳亚洲图书等殊荣。海斯勒本人亦被《华尔街日报》赞为“关注现代中国的最具思想性的西方作家之一”。 内容简介 《何伟三部曲套装》按时间顺序分别收录中国纪实三部曲序曲、终篇和番外篇，包含《江城》《奇石》《寻路中国》共3册，感受何伟笔下我们不知道或拒绝认识的真实中国。《江城》（豆瓣评分：9. 0分）本书是何伟所著中国纪实三部曲之序曲。作者曾于1996年参加和平队，以美国“和平队”志愿者身份深入中国腹地，在四川涪陵师专担任了两年英语老师。《江城》这本书就是作者何伟对这段特殊经历的纪录和思考。他绘制了一幅90年代中期中国西南小城的社会景象，折射出小人物在文革、计划生育、改革开放、国有企业改革、三峡大坝建设等各种社会大事件中的命运沉浮。《寻路中国：从乡村到工厂的自驾之旅》（豆瓣评分：9. 0分）中国纪实三部曲之尾曲，讲述了他驾车漫游中国大陆的经历。《寻路中国》一书有几条不同的线索。一条叙述了彼得·海斯勒由东海之滨沿着长城一路向西，横跨中国北方的万里行程；另一条线索聚焦于一个因中国汽车业的高速发展而发生巨变的乡村。书中探讨经济，追踪发展的源头，探究个人对变革的应对。如前两本书那样，它研究中国的核心议题，但并不通过解读著名的政治或文化人物来实现这个目的，也不做宏观的大而无当的分析，它相信通过叙述普通中国人的经历来展现中国变革的实质。《奇石：来自东西方的报道》（豆瓣评分：7. 6分）彼得·海斯勒创作的中国纪实三部曲的番外篇，收入三部曲写作期间，即时或零星素材创作的文章，可以说是三部曲的前传，也是那三本书中部分人物的后续跟踪。简体中译本独家增补6篇故事（4篇《甲骨文》故事、2篇埃及故事）。从广东鼠肉餐馆到安徽汽车厂，从东京黑社会到尼泊尔村庄，不拘一格。该书文章延续何伟中国纪实的风格，通过个人命运透视历史，没有说教和批判，只有冷静的观察以及贯穿始终的幽默。 媒体推荐 “何伟写出了我熟视无暏的中国，和那种亲切的酸楚。那个酸楚就是剧变的实质——人最大的痛苦就是心灵没有归属，不管你知不知觉，承不承认。”——柴静 “何伟的作品平静而充满自信，以绝妙的语调和姿态赋予他所描绘的时刻以生命。他知道何时应该参与行动，何时应该等待事情发生。”——史景迁 “在一个信息时代，做一个中国通不难。而作者要做一个诚实周密的记录者，他记述土地的忧伤和人民的努力，他一一做到了。”——2011年新浪年度十大好书《寻路中国》颁奖词 “何伟的笔下是真中国，是连一些生活在中国的青年人都不知道或拒绝认识的中国。”——《南方人物周刊》

In recent years, China has proffered tantalizingly fertile landscapes to photographers exploring the socioeconomic impact of its arrival as a superpower. Such projects typically hew closely to well-established narratives, revealing an obvious that China is undergoing a radical wave of transformational change.In his first monograph, Chinese Sentiment, Shen Wei has performed a radical act in its own right by sidestepping all such cliche. Instead, he presents a vision of his homeland that peers deep beneath the surface, plumbing the psychological shades of gray, and finding a nation ambivalent to its perpetual state of suspension between past and future.Running counter to virtually every Western interpretation, Shen Wei reveals the human scale of a lone figure observed through the trees; the stolen glance of a young girl; a moment of repose in the bedroom. With nuanced observation and a serene visual style marked with wit and compassion, the seventy-five images in Chinese Sentiment render a complex portrait of modern China.Employing the language of photography in a manner both dreamlike and cinematic in scope, Chinese Sentiment gracefully limns the interior life of a nation in the throes of epic change.The introduction is by Peter Hessler, staff writer and former Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker . Hessler is the author of three books on China, including Country Driving, A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory (Harper, 2010). Chinese Sentiment was guest-edited by Lesley A. Martin, publisher of the Aperture Foundation book program.

Hessler (Hessler) Portfolio (of 3): Kistler + + River City wayfinding China