Joyland Publishing and Tables of Contents Celebrate THREE by Na Zhong

"A story of recent China but also a universal tale of young women's emancipation, Three is a taut and nuanced excavation of maternal love, family bond, and the cost of ambition and change." —Yiyun Li, author of The Book of Goose

After a long separation, a writer living in America reunites with her family in a small, industrial town in China. On her return, she looks back at her fraught relationship with her mother and finds herself telling her story from the beginning, going back as far as living memory will allow. As she chronicles her mother's life, she details the intimate moments they shared as they weathered fights, layoffs, and illnesses, and she unearths the forces that pressurized and combusted their lives: echoes of distant wars and not-too-distant revolutions, tides of breakneck modernization, and the relentless erosion of time.

For fans of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, Three is fable-like and precise, at once a sweeping view of an era and an elegy for a splintered family.

is a Chinese writer based in New York. Her writings have appeared in The Drift, The Kenyon Review, and Equator, among others. A MacDowell Fellow and Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, she co-founded Accent Accent and writes a column at China Books Review. Three is her first novella.

is a poet and artist identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of belonging and dislocation, G/god and spirituality, and beauty::cruelty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices. She edits poetry at The Margins and has received endorsements from Art Omi, Asian American Writers Workshop, Kundiman, Brooklyn Poets, UNESCO, Millay Colony For The Arts and elsewhere. Her work has been published extensively, including Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The Nation, Poets.org and others. Her first book of poems Coining A Wishing Tower won the Broken River Prize, was a highly commendable book by UK's Forward Arts Foundation and was an Indies Award Finalist. Originally from Lahore, she is based in New York City.

is a fiction writer, playwright and the translator of over thirty books from Chinese. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize, and his play Salesman之死 was awarded an Obie. He lives in Flushing, Queens.

is a writer and editor based in New York. Her journalism has been featured in The Guardian, Guernica, The New Republic, New York Public Radio, and Vogue, among others. Her fiction has also been honored by the Bridport Prize, the Center for Fiction Emerging Writers fellowship, the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors Prize, and the Zoetrope All-Story Short Fiction Competition.

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