The woman is Therese Irxmayer, aka Lady Holly, an arms dealer with a sharp mind, a history and a great derriere. The novel’s genesis rests in her mysterious presence. Concession is a fantastic romantic-sexy-spy novel, but it is also a deeply considered psychological exploration of real-life events in colonial Shanghai. According to Xiao Bai, while he was in the early stages of researching the novel, he happened upon this line in the Shanghai Municipal Archives:

It was the White Russian Woman who first attracted Lieutenant Sarly’s attention.

This woman was Therese. Xiao continues:

That is how it all started. In 1931, Lieutenant Sarly of the Political Section was attempting to make sense of the chaos in the French Concession in order to crack an unsolved case. He was poring over old files when he found this White Russian woman. Almost eighty years later, I was sitting in the reading room trying to piece together a chain of events that happened at the beginning of the 1930s in the French Concession. As I was reading the same files Sarly would have read, the same woman leaped right out at me.

In Xiao’s telling, Therese is the lover of Weiss Hsueh, aka Hsueh Wei-shih, a Franco-Chinese photographer with a penchant for murder scenes. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say Hsueh is Therese’s lover, so jealous is he of her frequent philandering. In any case, his connection to Therese leads Hsueh to become the key detective in Lieutenant Sarly’s investigation.

It is Hsueh’s photographic eye that brings us to the novel’s next driving question:

Who is that woman?

She is Leng Hsiao-man. In the novel’s first chapters, she is a revolutionary married to the counter-revolutionary she is about to betray. Just before this assassination, Hsueh photographs her. Finding her expression of desperation intriguing, Hsueh wants to know who she could be. After the assassination, so does every one else, including Lieutenant Sarly and Leng herself. Vacillating between self-doubt and revolutionary zeal, Leng’s actions remain mysterious, perhaps to herself most of all.

Xiao’s attention to mystery, and not just the whodunit, is the novel’s great strength. Its fragmented storytelling, together with its attention to the characters’ own sense of nebulousness, allows Xiao to explore the effects of living in liminal space and liminal times—like colonial Shanghai—on the human psyche. The mystery is so well balanced by attention to cinematic detail, colors, tastes, smells, sounds, and movements, that the novel’s scenes rise before us vividly, even as each scene is only a piece in the ever evolving montage of who these characters are.

Even at the very end, Therese, Leng, and Hsueh, who come to form both the love triangle and the crime triangle around which the novel revolves, remain as unfocused, and yet intriguing, to us as they do to each other. And our pleasure as readers is not so much to follow the twists and curves of the plot, although that is certainly entertaining, but rather to imagine, with each detail, who these women—and men—are, or could possibly be.

Emily Goedde received an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa. She is now a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan.

Here’s the beginning of Emily’s review:

Who is this woman? This is the question that opens Xiao Bai’s French Concession, a novel of colonial-era Shanghai’s spies and revolutionaries, police and smugglers, who scoot between doorways, walk nonchalantly down avenues, smoke cigars in police bureaus, and lounge in expensive European hotels.

The woman is Therese Irxmayer, aka Lady Holly, an arms dealer with a sharp mind, a history and a great derriere. The novel’s genesis rests in her mysterious presence. Concession is a fantastic romantic-sexy-spy novel, but it is also a deeply considered psychological exploration of real-life events in colonial Shanghai. According to Xiao Bai, while he was in the early stages of researching the novel, he happened upon this line in the Shanghai Municipal Archives:

It was the White Russian Woman who first attracted Lieutenant Sarly’s attention.

For the rest of the review, go here.

First off, HarperCollins did a special promotion for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, in which you could, using HC’s Browse Inside program, read the whole book for free. (To the best of my knowledge, you couldn’t download the book, something readers complained about. Actually, it seems like readers weren’t all that keen on the entire HC Browse Inside program—56% of those surved said that they didn’t enjoy the process.) HC tracked the results, tried to correlate this with sales and came up with the following, which Neil Gaiman posted on his

The Indies [ie. independent booksellers — Neil] are the only sales channel where we have confidence that incremental sales were driven by this promotion. In the Bookscan data reported for Independents we see a marked increase in weekly sales across all of Neil’s books, not just American Gods during the time of the contest and promotion. Following the promotion, sales returned to pre-promotion levels.

This is what a lot of ebook advocates have argued for a long time. Although on the other hand, one could speculate that the fact that the majority of people didn’t like the HC Browse Inside process led to more people buying the actual book after getting frustrated with the web version. Regardless, more copies were sold during this promotion, which is good for the author, publisher, and bookstores.

On the same day, I came across about Tor’s free download program.

A few months ago Tobias Buckell noticed a trend in his book sales that most midlist novelists don’t typically see. His book Crystal Rain, which had been released in mass market paperback a year before, experienced a sudden spike in sales, more than doubling from the previous week. [. . .]

When Buckell opened a Bookscan account to track his sales he had to sign a nondisclosure agreement barring him from giving any specific numbers, but in a phone interview he asserted that the sales bump was significant enough not to have been a fluke.

But what caused this sudden increase?

Because of all the myriad factors that drive product buys, it’s incredibly hard to pinpoint specific triggers, but it just so happened that the jump occurred right after Crystal Rain’s publisher, Tor Books, had released a free e-book version of the novel online.

Tor began putting out free e-book titles earlier this year to pump up subscriptions to its email newsletter. It will use that newsletter to promote a new science fiction “super site” it’s reportedly launching on July 20 to coincide with the date Americans landed on the moon. Rather than posting the books at a specific URL where people can go to download them, only those who have joined the newsletter list are given access to the titles.

There have been other instances of publishers giving away free e-books—like the promo last year for Beautiful Children by Charles Boch, or the entire Wowio setup (which, you know, is offline right now)—but I suspect that more results like these will lead to even more experiments, hopefully from both large corporate publishers and indie presses.

An uncut edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, a highly praised and controversial novel published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is finally coming out in English.

“The First Circle is one of the most important novels of the 20th century and we are thrilled to be making this masterpiece available in its full glory,” Carrie Kania, senior vice president and publisher of Harper Perennial, said Tuesday in a statement.

Harper Perennial, a paperback imprint of HarperCollins, will release The First Circle in 2009. The 89-year-old Solzhenitsyn, winner in 1970 of the Nobel Prize for literature, returned to his homeland in the 1990s after two decades in exile and now lives in Moscow.