-
A rollicking adventure story set in the jungles of far Southern China, The Invisible Valley follows a young man whose friendship with a band of migrant woodcutters plunges him into a strange world of magic, mysticism, and giant snakes. Join author Su Wei and his translator, Austin Woerner, as they tell the story of their unlikely friendship and the ten-year-long experiment in creative translation that led to this publication.Su Wei spent ten years working on a rubber plantation on Hainan Island during the Cultural Revolution, and afterward he was among the first mainland Chinese to pursue an advanced degree in the United States. He returned to China and played a key role in the Beijing literary scene during the 1980s “culture fever,” relocated permanently to the U.S. afterward, and since 1997 has been a lecturer at Yale University. He has published three novels and several books of short stories and personal essays in Chinese. The Invisible Valley, translated by Austin Woerner, is his first book to be published in English.Austin Woerner, a Chinese-English literary translator, has translated two volumes of poetry, Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe 《重影：欧阳江河诗选》and Phoenix 《凤凰》, and edited the English edition of the innovative, bilingual Chinese literary journal Chutzpah! 《天南》. Together with Ou Ning 欧宁, he co-edited the short fiction anthology Chutzpah!: New Voices from China. He has a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School, formerly taught creative writing and translation at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and is now a lecturer at Duke Kunshan University.
