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.

The 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 fathers 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.

Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes is an account of a familys struggles during one momentous year; plagued by disease, death, and the shady promise of life in a larger town, the family slowly disintegrates.

Finally, 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.