April Book Club: Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin

Note: Order Notes of a Crocodile now!

This event will be hosted at Pairing Cafe in Greenpoint. Tickets include one free drink from Pairing.

About Yellow Peril Books' Book Club

We're so excited to welcome you to our ongoing community book club hosted around Brooklyn! Each month, we host an in person book club at a local AAPI owned business in Brooklyn. We started this book club with a few goals in mind

• Spotlight some of our favorite AAPI owned businesses, and ensure ticket revenues are invested in supporting these amazing gems. For most events, all ticket proceeds go towards the hosting business. If you'd like to donate to YPB to support our programming efforts, please donate here.

• Feature different Asian and Asian American authors and their works

• Bring our community together in person to facilitate deeper conversation and connection

Book Club Rules

• You commit to treating everyone with respect and care

• Stay home if you feel sick!

• You do NOT need to have read or finished the book, but you do have to be ready for spoilers! We'll be discussing the themes of the book and you can still participate :)

If you would like to attend but the ticket cost is prohibitive, please reach out to contact@yellowperilbooks.com and we will try to find a solution! We never want lack of funds to be a barrier to entry.

About Notes of a Crocodile

The English-language premiere of Qiu Miaojin's coming-of-age novel about queer teenagers in Taiwan, a cult classic in China and winner of the 1995 China Times Literature Award.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin's cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.

Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.

About the Author and Translator

Qiu Miaojin (1969–1995) was one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer. Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While attending graduate school in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. In 2007, a two-volume edition of her Diaries was published, and in 2017 she became the subject of a feature-length documentary by Evans Chan titled Death in Montmartre.

Bonnie Huie is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Her rendition of Motojirō Kajii’s story “Under the Cherry Blossoms” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she has also translated the work of Tatsuhiro Ōshiro. Her writings and translations appear in The Brooklyn Rail, Kyoto Journal, and Afterimage. Huie lives in New York.

Refunds and Exchanges

Ticket purchases cannot be refunded. Because we don't have our own storefront, we host our events in partnership with other local small businesses, meaning we share all operational costs as well as revenue with them based on anticipated attendance. The only way for our partner businesses to properly prepare supplies, space, and food/drinks for these events is to have a clear idea of how many attendees to expect, meaning that any last-minute changes make it that much harder to host.

Exchanges for future events are allowed if you reach out a minimum of 10 days before the start of the original event you signed up for. Our events are usually sold out and we want to make sure that we'd have enough time to fill any open spots with people who are hoping to join. Please reach out to contact@yellowperilbooks.com if you have any issues with your ticket.