Originally self-published in 1935, H.T. Tsiang’s hallucinatory, quasi-experimental novel 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 brilliantly blends Gertrude Stein’s playful language with the political satire of Carl Sandberg’s prose fables. It follows the peripatetic musings of a young man throughout a single day that takes him from a worker’s cafeteria to a world of dinner clubs and sexual exploitation in the highest echelons of society, and back again to the streets of Greenwich Village, where starving families rub shoulders with the recently evicted. Each chapter comprises a single hour of the day. Tsiang’s style combines satirical allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non-sequiturs and slogans, as well as elements of classical and contemporary Chinese literature. Adventurous and unclassifiable in its combination of avant-garde and proletarian concerns, Hanging on Union Square is a major rediscovery of a uniquely American voice.
Poet, playwright, and novelist. Hsi Tseng Tsiang (H.T. Tsiang) was born in China in 1899 and came to America as a child. He was involved with the Greenwich Village literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s, and self-published a number of books which he would hawk at downtown political meetings. Tsiang also appeared as an actor in Hollywood, most notably in the film Tokyo Rose. He died in 1971 in Los Angeles, CA.
“H. T. Tsiang is a young proletarian Chinese writer of authentic value… Now Mr. Tsiang has written a satiric allegory, a potpourri of narrative and song, entitled The Hanging on Union Square... [T]he book is original in form without being labored; and it’s remarkable for its whimsical insights into various strata of society and for its flashing counterpoint of almost savage sensuality and delicate pity. Throughout, it is alive and evocative.
Mr. Tsiang’s fanciful and often fantastic visions of workers on Union Square and of the parasites in neighboring night clubs and office buildings… convey more truth than a shelf or reportial novels.”
—WALDO FRANK
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FORMAT: Pbk, 5.25 x 7.5 in. / 240 pgs. LIST PRICE: U.S. $17.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $25.5 GBP £15.99 ISBN: 9781885030092 PUBLISHER: Kaya Press AVAILABLE: 5/31/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Kaya Press. By H.T. Tsiang. Foreword by Floyd Cheung.
Originally self-published in 1935, H.T. Tsiang’s hallucinatory, quasi-experimental novel 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 brilliantly blends Gertrude Stein’s playful language with the political satire of Carl Sandberg’s prose fables. It follows the peripatetic musings of a young man throughout a single day that takes him from a worker’s cafeteria to a world of dinner clubs and sexual exploitation in the highest echelons of society, and back again to the streets of Greenwich Village, where starving families rub shoulders with the recently evicted. Each chapter comprises a single hour of the day. Tsiang’s style combines satirical allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non-sequiturs and slogans, as well as elements of classical and contemporary Chinese literature. Adventurous and unclassifiable in its combination of avant-garde and proletarian concerns, Hanging on Union Square is a major rediscovery of a uniquely American voice.
