We’re delighted to announce our forthcoming second book, The Way Forward: Finding Sovereignty and Wisdom by Xuemo, translated by Riccardo Moratto.
This is the first in a planned programme of collaborations with Xuemo and Professor Moratto, to publish Xuemo’s non-fiction titles in the English language. We’ll be taking things one book at a time, but the hope is that we’ll be able to publish an array of such titles over the next few years.
Who is Xuemo?
Xuemo, born in 1963 as Chen Kaihong, is an award-winning contemporary writer from Gansu in the western region of China. He has written more than 100 books, appearing in over 200 editions, with translations available in more than 20 languages, including English, French, German, Korean, Russian, and Spanish. His most famous work is the Desert Trilogy of novels White Tiger Pass, Desert Hunters and Desert Rites. While these titles (and many of his others) are works of fiction and poetry, Xuemo is a philosopher who also explores ideas about life, death and purpose through non-fiction; The Way Forward is one such work.
There’s a lot more information about Xuemo, including videos and links to purchase a number of his other books on his own website https://xuemo.com/.
About the book
This is the back-cover copy we’re currently working with and gives a concise outline of the book itself:
Drawing on his renowned fictional works and his own life story, Xuemo presents what he sees as the path to meaning, fulfillment and self-determination. How should we live? How can we deal with loss? What, in the end, is truly important?
Xuemo’s adopted name means literally ‘Snow Desert’, reflecting the landscape of his native Gansu province of Western China. All of his works draw upon and reflect the culture of the people of this harsh and isolated environment, as well as upon his deep scholarship of the Confucian and Buddhist traditions. In The Way Forward he tries to answer the fundamental questions of how we should be in the world, how to make important life decisions, and how we should set our fundamental priorities. This is no glib self-help book, the answers it offers are by no means easy ones. Instead, Xuemo challenges us to reflect upon what we truly value and what we truly need in life, rejecting distractions and whatever is ultimately inconsequential.
It’s a book reflecting on how we can find meaning and purpose in our lives, and — having found it — how we can be directed by it. It is an intense and thought-provoking read, I’ve read it through several times in the course of editing and proof-reading the text and I’ve found I get something slightly different from it every time.
So how does this fit with Tithebarn Press’s Themes?
There is a narrow, literal, answer to this, and also a broader one. Narrowly speaking, it does not fit within our existing Themes and — because we anticipate cooperating on future translations of Xuemo’s books — we will be treating “Xuemo” as a Theme unto himself in terms of how we categorise his books structurally.
Actually, of course this is in many respects a book about Power, and we considered whether to simply treat this book as any other under the Power Theme. The main reason why we didn’t is the anticipation of future Xuemo translation projects, which may or may not neatly fit under one of our existing Themes. Given that we do anticipate this possibility, it would leave us potentially trying to justify each one on a case by case thematic basis, which felt like it could become intellectually dishonest. Besides, if we do indeed continue to publish many more Xuemo titles in translation, it makes sense for readers to find them in one place, and not to risk overwhelming the books under any of our other Themes.
What about peer review?
This is actually a secondary reason for keeping Xuemo titles distinct from our other books. Unlike the other books we publish, we will not be subjecting Xuemo titles to peer review. They are works of philosophy and ideas rather than being based on research, and so it would not be meaningful to do so. A reviewer might like or dislike, agree with or disagree with Xuemo’s arguments, but these are questions of aesthetics and of opinion, not of fact or rigour. Besides, they are translations of books that already exist in Chinese and aim to represent those works.
What we *are* doing is working closely with the translator, Professor Riccardo Moratto (Deputy Director Deputy of the Research Center for Chinese Discourse and Global Communication at Tongji University, Shanghai) on ensuring our translations are faithful representations of the Chinese text, while also being accessible and readable for English-speaking (well, English-reading, but nobody says that) audiences. That’s a delicate balance, and one that does involve some compromises and difficult editorial decisions. Professor Moratto writes about this very elegantly in his foreword, which we’ll be making available soon as a sample.
So what makes this a Tithebarn Press book?
Going back to basics here, we started Tithebarn Press in order to help authors with interesting ideas connect with readers looking for good quality, well-written and argued books. We want to publish intellectually stimulating books, exposing our readers to a range of authors and voices from around the world. We very much believe that The Way Forward is such a book. I defy anyone to read it through and still see the world in the same way afterwards!
Sounds great, when can I buy it?
We’re finalising the files, the digital equivalent of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s right now, and aim to have it available by the end of September, in all the same places you can currently buy Eden’s Alternative to Appeasement.
We’ll be back with an update on this shortly, alongside more material from and about the book.
