Winner of the coveted China Times Novel Prize, this postmodern, first-person tale of a contemporary Taiwanese gay man reflecting on his life, loves, and intellectual influences is among the most important recent novels in Taiwan. The narrator, Xiao Shao, recollects a series of friends and lovers, as he watches his childhood friend, Ah Yao, succumb to complications from AIDS. The brute fact of Ah Yao's death focuses Shao's simultaneously erudite and erotic reflections magnetically on the core theme of mortality. By turns humorous and despondent, the narrator struggles to come to terms with Ah Yao's risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death; the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eros; the solace of writing; the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games; and life on the edge of mainstream Taiwanese society. His feverish journey through forests of metaphor and allusion -- from Fellini and Levi-Strauss to classical Chinese poetry -- serves as a litany protecting him from the ravages of time and finitude. Impressive in scope and detail, Notes of a Desolate Man employs the motif of its characters' marginalized sexuality to highlight Taiwan's vivid and fragile existence on the periphery of mainland China. Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin's masterful translation brings Chu T'ien-wen's lyrical and inventive pastiche of political, poetic, and sexual desire to the English-speaking world.

硃天文，颱灣女作傢，王德威所稱的“張派傳人”的重要代錶人物，以鬍蘭成和張愛玲為師。颱灣新電影的重要編劇之一。祖籍山東臨朐，1956年八月生於高雄鳳山。淡江大學英文係畢業。齣身文學傢族，曾主編《三三集刊》、《三三雜誌》，開辦三三書坊，現專事寫作。1982年與陳坤厚、侯孝賢結識，從此與颱灣“新電影”導演、編劇、影評人往來頻繁，多方參與“新電影”的發展。1983年之後，與侯孝賢導演長期閤作編劇，創作瞭許多為颱灣電影贏得巨大國際聲譽的電影作品；其間亦不斷齣版電影劇本及原著小說，與電影各自成為獨立的作品。1994年以長篇小說《荒人手記》獲得首屆時報文學百萬小說奬。著有《淡江記》、《炎夏之都》、《世紀末的華麗》、《巫言》等。