162 chinese literature today vol. 7 no. 1 Xiaomei Chen. Staging Chinese Revolution: Theatre, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda. Nonfiction. New York. Columbia University Press. 2016. 384 pages. $60.00. ISBN: 9780231166386 While it may seem institutionalized, propaganda can be deeply intertwined with personal memories and provoke nostalgic emotions. Propaganda performances in China shape national and personal histories. Staging Chinese Revolution tells the story of socialist propaganda in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as manifested in its propaganda narrative on stage and screen. The book demonstrates convincingly that, contrary to popular understanding, propaganda is far from a monolithic genre, and that propaganda is not limited to totalitarian regimes. Moreover, PRC propaganda is “deeply lodged in personal memories and the nostalgia for a by-gone past.” The creation of propaganda, the author maintains, involves a “dialogic and dialectical process.” The book covers a substantial number of important modern Chinese playwrights in a unique way that perhaps only Xiaomei Chen can accomplish. One of the leading authorities on Chinese performance culture, Chen examines both renowned and little-known plays. The comprehensive history provided within these pages is one of the most important contributions ofthe book. Chen is also the author of Acting the “Right” Part (2002), Occidentalism (1995), Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama (2010; abridged edition 2014), and Reading the Right Text (2003). Two primary genres are examined, namely historical narratives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and propaganda drama in theatre, ilm, and on television. While often dismissed by the journalistic discourses, propaganda, the author contents, is far from a “monolithic” and “top-down” practice characterized “solely by censorship and suppression of freedom.” Only by treating propaganda as “a dialogic and dialectical process” will we be able to fully understand the forces and contradictions of this particular form of expression, which is clearly not limited to a totalitarian regime but resurfaces under various guises in all societies. The four chapters are organized chronologically around key “founding father” igures in modern Chinese history: Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and around the so-called “red classics.” The coverage in terms of historical periods is ambitious and spans a century of Chinese arts and politics, beginning with a close reading of the “myths” of Tian Han, a key igure of the May Fourth generation, and concluding with an analysis of song writers’ attempts to “patch over” Deng Xiaoping’s legacy. One of the biggest challenges of the CCP is maintaining its monopoly (or “single party control,” as borrowed from Leninism) while developing an economy with “capitalist characteristics.” This book shows how propaganda produces narratives that hold the socialist state together. Staging Chinese Revolution con- textualizes Tian Han’s and other igures’ search for a proletarian theatre within the manufactured histories of founding fathers and an evolving deinition and awareness of revolutions. Readers will appreciate the book’s attention to multiple genres ranging from huaju plays and music and dance theatre to eulogy. Not to be missed is the epilogue where Chen asks, “where are the founding mothers?” Alexa Alice Joubin George Washington University Kaitlin Solimine. Empire of Glass. Fiction. New York. Ig Publishing. 2017. 299 pages. $11.96. ISBN: 9781632460554 A inalist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, Kaitlin Solimine’s debut novel, Empire of Glass, tells the story of one family during a tumultuous forty years of Chinese history, from 1950 to 1990. The story arc is refracted through multiple narrative layers and has a ictional frame: the novel is meant to be authored by Huang Li- Ming, a Chinese woman who left a note before her death asking an American woman nicknamed “Lao K”—a character based on Solimine herself—to translate it for her. Li- Ming was Lao K’s “Mama” during her years as a high school exchange student in 1990s Beijing. In her ictive “translator’s note” penned in 2016, Lao K explains that the novel should be read as an embellished translation of Li-Ming’s original book. Li-Ming narrates the life of her husband, Wang Guanmiao, or “Baba,” Lao K’s “father,” from his childhood in Shanghai during the ’50s, to his time as a soldier in the