Famine turns to feast for Chinese readers

On one wall were covers from the Translation Classics Series published in the late 1970s and '80s, including Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maughan, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Lord of the Flies by William Golding and Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

Elsewhere, visitors could find works by writers such as W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth. Murakami and Kundera are extremely popular in China.

Poetry, essays, literary criticism and dictionaries were on display.

Since the Chinese edition of Country Driving, by Peter Hessler, a United States journalist and writer, was published in 2011, Zhang Jiren, director of the editor's office for social sciences at the Shanghai Translation Publishing House, said 30 nonfiction works had been published by the company, and many had been well received by readers.

Country Driving and River Town, also by Hessler, have each sold more than 300,000 copies in China. Shark Fins and Sichuan Pepper, a book on Chinese food by British writer and cook Fuchsia Dunlop, which was published in July, has been reprinted four times.