As Long As Nothing Happens, Nothing Will: Stories.

New York, NY Grove Press, July 1991. Hardcover First Ed USA, First Printing indicated. First Ed USA, First Printing indicated. Very Good+ in Near Fine DJ: Book shows indications of careful use: barely discernible spine lean; mild bump at the lower front corner tip has caused a small tear in the paper over boards; Else flawless; binding secure; text clean. DJ shows only the mildest rubbing; price intact. Overall, remains clean, sturdy, and quite presentable. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. 196pp. Deckle Fore-edge. Hardback with DJ. A relentlessly critical and often scathing collection from prize-winning writer Zhang Jie (Heavy Wings, 1989): stories that are as much an indictment of life in post-Cultural Revolution China as any work of reportage. A victim herself of the notorious practice of ``reeducation,'' Zhang Jie writes with firsthand experience of the bureaucratic torpor, nepotism, hypocrisy, and of the ubiquitous paralyzing politicizing of everything from arranging a funeral for a loyal member to trying to get a patient into a hospital elevator in time for life-saving surgery. The longest piece--''What's Wrong with Him?''--is a series of vignettes, straight out of some horror movie, of men and women associated with a hospital. Women doctors faint because they are undernourished; an exhausted surgeon has to share his room with a boorish and heavy-drinking carpenter; a cardiologist invited to visit America must travel with an assistant approved by the Party; operations are bungled, and only Party officials receive proper care. In ``The Other World,'' an artist from the country, discovered by a rich foreigner, is exploited by members of the local cultural institutions who cynically use him for their own advancement. Two other notable stories are ``Today's Agenda,'' a devastating satire of bureaucratic inertia, and ``Professor Meng Abroad,'' in which the poor professor's need for a restroom becomes a symbolic tussle between him, the individual, and the Party, in the form of its representative, tour leader Miss Ding. Though infused with passion and searing in their descriptions of a grossly flawed society, Zhang Jie's stories are remarkably free of polemic.