Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas - Su Tong

This collection of three novellas includes Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes, Opium Family, and Raise the Red Lantern, upon which the Academy Award(-nominated film was based. \n \nThe brutal realities of the dark places Su Tong depicts in this collection of novellas set in 1930s provincial China -- worlds of prostitution, poverty, and drug addiction -- belie his prose of stunning and simplebeauty. The title novella, Raise the Red Lantern, which became a critically acclaimed film, tells the story of Lotus, a young woman whose father's suicide forces her to become the concubine of a wealthy merchant. Crushed by loneliness, despair, and cruel treatment, Lotus finds her descent into insanity both a weapon and a refuge.\n \nNineteen Thirty-Four Escapes is an account of a family's struggles during one momentous year; plagued by disease, death, and the shady promise of life in a larger town, the family slowly disintegrates.\n \nFinally, Opium Family details the last years of a landowning clan whose demise is brought about by corruption, lust, and treachery -- fruits of the insidious crop they harvest.\n