Floyd Cheung
Floyd Cheung teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature as well as the American Studies Program at Smith College.
#floydcheung
books
The Hanging on Union Square
Now available from Penguin-Random House.
H.T. Tsiang’s satiric, quasi-experimental novel The Hanging on Union Square explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York – an era of union busting and food lines – in an ambitious style that combines humor-laced allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non sequiturs, and slogans. Back in print for the first time since it was originally self-published in 1935, Kaya’s new edition of the novel follows out-of-work protagonist Mr. Nut from a workers’ cafeteria to dinner clubs and sexual exploitation in the highest echelons of society, then back again to the streets of Greenwich Village, where starving families rub shoulders with the recently evicted. In the process, Tsiang captures, hour-by-hour, Mr. Nut’s profound transformation from itinerant roustabout to radical activist. Adventurous and unclassifiable in its combination of avant-garde and proletarian concerns, The Hanging on Union Square is a major rediscovery of a uniquely American voice.
More Floyd Cheung Books
Lexington Books 2012
Temple University Press 2005
praise
“This is a voice to which the White world … will have to listen more and more as time passes. I do not mean to this particular young Chinese Poet, but to the movement which he voices.”
— Upton Sinclair, “The Jungle”
“I finished H.T. Tsiang’s masterpiece a few hours ago and I’m still not sure where I am and what day this is. My mind has been picked apart and reassembled. I need a drink.”
— Gary Shteyngart, “Super Sad True Love Story”
“I became fascinated with the Chinese-American writer H.T. Tsiang when I found a first edition of The Hanging on Union Square. It felt like slipping into another person’s hallucination.”
— Hua Hsu, “A Floating Chinaman” (forthcoming)
Floyd Cheung news
The Margins features legendary agitprop author H.T. Tsiang–Kaya recently released his And China Has Hands–and his continual relevance in the face of today’s divisive political climate. Cheung describes H.T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands as a “Marxist, feminist, pro-immigrant satire of the American Dream”, and in our current times this sounds like the epitome of radical […]
On Thursday, October 20th, we will be celebrating And China Has Hands, a novel by political activist, life-long eccentric, and agitprop author H.T. Tsiang. Tsiang’s mostly self-published experimental novels and poetry, published in the 1920s and 1930s, are a testament to his singular unwillingness to compromise his vision or his politics in order to fit within the […]
We over here at Kaya Press are more than proud to host a reading and discussion of H.T. Tsiang and his writings by New Yorker contributing writer Hua Hsu, whose recently published A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press), explores Tsiang’s life in detail. Joining him will be Floyd Cheung, the scholar and writer who […]
Kaya Press celebrates 20 years of publishing innovative Asian Pacific American and Asian diasporic literature in San Francisco, April 16 – 19, in conjunction with the Association for Asian American Studies Conference. Kaya 20th Anniversary Reading at City Lights Bookstore | Thursday April 17 | 7:30 p.m. | 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway Come to […]