Is there any good modern chinese lit?

doubtful. anything of substance would probably be interpreted as having some sort of anti-gov undertone and wouldn't see publication

>>9985644

Can Xue gets Borges comparisons but take that with a grain of salt since that is critic shorthand for "I suck at my job."

the acting in three kingdoms is pretty bad.

was hong kong the only good source of modern chinese art?

Republic of Wine is pretty good as far as I can tell.
Chinese literature isn't brought to you on a silver platter, oftentimes you have to look for it, seek it out.

There's some decent modernISM in vernacular like 围城 which practically all decently read generation X Chinese have heard of, it's about some of the downfalls of pseudo-intellectualism, /lit/ would be familiar. Mo Yan has been mentioned and is pretty nice. 射鵰英雄傳 was my father's favorite series of semi-historical fiction when he was young though as far as I know there's no English translation though it's in vernacular.

The three body problem trilogy is great, I'd say comparable to Asimov.

Also Cao Cao is the boss

>>9985644

I can't read Chinese

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I like the novels from Qiu Xiaolong. They take place in Shanghai, it's about a cop who investigates murders but then also in his free time he writes poems and does some translations EN-CN/CN-EN, honestly I find it quite /comfy/. I've just read the first two novels, they take place at the beginning of the 90s, when Shanghai was starting to develop already. I think the later novels arrive to the present time.

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>>9985644
Yes

Is it worth it to learn chinese just for the lit?

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

>>9985644
Steven Seagal is not Chinese, anon...

>>9987369
Absolutely not since you would have to learn classical Chinese, the Latin of Mandarin Chinese. All just to read some classic books. It should be fine just reading the English translations. Look up the 四书 and maybe the 五经 if you're into stuff like songs and historical records and trigrams.

Tao Lin

>>9987373
I was gifted a copy of that yesterday. It's a fucking fine book. I love the prose.

>>9985647
How about literature from Hong Kong or Taiwan?

>>9987631
>learn classic Chinese
Um sweetie, normal Chinese young people who just know their dialect and also Mandarin Chinese can still read tablets and inscriptions from thousands of years ago. All you would need to read "classic chinese" is to learn mandarin.

>>9987957
>You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.

>>9985724
legend of the condor heroes

jin yong is the best chinese literature

A Cheng's "the Chess King" is the only piece of contemporary Chinese fiction that I would still read even if I weren't invested in the language.

That said, it would be wrong to dismiss contemporary Chinese fiction. Like anywhere else, most of the best rises to passable, only the exceptional is... exceptional.

>>9988324
The characters are the same, the grammar is not.

>>9988324
>>9988444

the characters are also different for the most part.. Mainlanders know simplified hanzi, while the ancient scripts are traditional hanzi. A normal chinese person would still recognise a few hundred or even a thousand or two traditional characters, but that’s about it.

Also, the meaning of some hanzi changes over time.

>>9988471
Yes, I was making an oversimplification.
It really is what latin is to Italian.

There's "good" modern Chinese lit, but a large majority of it remains untranslated. There's also the ideological issues of living in a controlled state where only certain ideas are allowed to be published, so the books are either from Hong Kong/Taiwan where there is leniency or it's independently published and spreads organically from person to person.

>>9988444
>>9988471
>>9988495
modern mandarin is FAR closer to classical chinese than italian is to latin. it's not a stretch to say a normal high school educated chinese person today can read classical chinese texts at just below fully fluent levels. it's also taught in their public education systems as part of the broader chinese/language curriculum

t. fluent in all four

>>9985644
murakami :^)

>>9988471
I showed my students movies in my classes and said "Fuck there's only traditional subs for this can you still read it?" And they said yes.

>>9986088

Came in here to say this. I picked up Death of a Red Heroine at a used bookstore and had a great time with it.