Danwei reports on the reissue of Jia Pingwa’s banned novel, Abandoned Capital (废都)：
Jia Pingwa’s controversial novel Feidu (废都, often translated as “Abandoned Capital”), which caused a sensation upon its publication in 1993 and was banned the same year, has returned to print after sixteen years during which it was only available in pirated editions.
The official launch, which is technically for a trilogy that includes both Turbulence (浮躁, 1987) and Qin Qiang (秦腔, 2005), will take place in Xi’an on August 8, but the book slipped quietly into stores last week without any advance notice.
The restraint is understandable given the book’s troubled history. Its initial publication in 1993 by the Beijing Publishing House was accompanied by a media frenzy that sensationalized the book as a modern Jin Ping Mei, the classic Ming Dynasty novel famed for its explicit sexual passages, and hype ranged from the author’s rumored million-yuan advance to a million-copy print run, and from speculation about the nature of the book’s deleted passages to the avalanche of bootleg versions that soon appeared in streetside book stalls. Feidu was banned before the year was out.
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