{"product_id":"books-from-heaven","title":"Books from Heaven","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"block\" data-type=\"endorsement\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“Souchou Yao is a generous scholar, grounding his rigorous examination of cultural desire and denial in vulnerable reflections on the intimate turmoils of his own diasporic experience. Here, Yao draws out the anxieties and attractions that have been attached to the Chinese classical tradition in the modern Sinophone world—from the literary iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement in early twentieth- century China, to his own attempts at forging a sense of cultural belonging by studying the classical canon in 1960s Malaysia. In this work he nonetheless reminds us to reclaim the imaginative pleasure of reading for ourselves.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"citation\"\u003e—Minerva Inwald, Assistant Lecturer in Chinese History, The University of Melbourne\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv class=\"block\" data-type=\"endorsement\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“In his luminous essay, Yao explores cultural identification, pleasure, resistance, and agency through an embodied reading of Xu Bing’s monumental \u003cem\u003eTian Shu\u003c\/em\u003e (天書, Book from the Sky). Xu’s invented 4,000 unreadable characters—exquisite, calligraphic, and uncanny—set the stage for Yao to move fluidly across the vast but entangled terrains of cultural theory, childhood language drills, and the uneasy seductions of Xu’s unreadable but aesthetically alluring texts. Yao writes viscerally about how language can enchant and broaden our worldviews even as it binds us to legacies of violence. Generous and incisive, \u003cem\u003eBooks from Heaven\u003c\/em\u003e revives the enduring power of language and their texts: not merely to hold meaning, but to transform our encounters with history, politics, culture, and above all, to lead us back to ourselves.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"citation\"\u003e—Lilian Chee, author of \u003cem\u003eArchitecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Art Guide Bookstore","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53042067734803,"sku":null,"price":16.5,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0860\/5614\/1075\/files\/IMG_7125.jpg?v=1770854239","url":"https:\/\/bookstore.artguide.com.au\/products\/books-from-heaven","provider":"Art Guide Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}