2008 Taipei International Book Exhibition: Varied fiction books showed different authoring style

February 20, 2008

At the 2008 Taipei International Book Exhibition, comic books and fiction books presented different authoring styles in formatting, story construction, and background settings. Examples of these were highlighted at two seminars entitled "On Trends in Creative Chinese Literature" and "From Shao Nu Xiao Yu (少女小漁, meaning in English as "A Young Girl - Little Fish") to The Banquet Bug (赴宴者)", as well as through recent fiction released by several publishers in Taiwan.

In the seminar about 'The Banquet Bug', a book, which has drawn by international media attention from "The Times", "Daily Mail", and "TIME Magazine", was recently translated into the Chinese language by John Chiang-sheng Kuo (郭強生). Taiwanese literature commentator Nan Fang Shou (南方朔, pen-name by Xin-ching Wang, 王杏慶) said the following at the seminar: Even though this novel [The Banquet Bug] focused on phenomena of "cheating", it evidently showed the presence of society in several places or incidents. At the other seminar, "On Trends in Creative Chinese Literature", which focused on wuxia novels, famous Taiwanese novelist Da-chuen Chang (張大春) commented with some specialists on wuxia novels and said: The wuxia novel in the Chinese-language world is very valuable, especially in some elements, story construction, history background, gangsters related to Chinese martial-arts, because several elements above may not be seen in Western (European and American) novels. I think the traditions in the Chinese-language world can still keep in path even though Jin Yong's novels were famous in the past.

In fact, the novel and fiction authoring in Taiwan has generally been steady and varied with such examples and the maturation of independent authoring.