James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic for more than thirty-five years, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and across the United States, and author of eleven previous books, including China Airborne: The Test of China’s Future, Postcards from Tomorrow: Reports from China, writes:
The hardest and most important challenge in writing about China is conveying the vivid individuality of the people who make it up. Peter Hessler does this wonderfully again. The students whose stories fill Other Rivers are funny but also super-serious, idealistic but also cynical, hopeful but also resigned – and in all ways memorable. They are China’s next generation, and we are fortunate to be able to meet them in this book.
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler will be published in the English language by Penguin Press in North America in July 2024 and by Atlantic Books in the UK and ANZ, with translation editions forthcoming as well.
Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000-2007 and Cairo correspondent from 2011-2016. He is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, which was New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award, Country Driving: A Journey through China from Farm to Factory, Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, and The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2011.