This is a collection of 12 short stories written by Chinese author Quan Zhang. The first story, titled "Colonel Ma's Father," was previously published in the 1996 winter issue of Folio: A literary Journal. In the second story titled "The balcony", the author used the stream of consciousness and disrupted time sequence that William Faulkner had used so well in his novel, The Sound and the Fury. As in Faulkner's novel, the protagonist is mentally...