These 21 Books Are the Year's Best, According to 8 Writers, Editors, and Book Critics | QDaily's Best Books of the Year, Part 4

The second installment of our full fiction list, this time from writers, editors, and book critics: Zhu Yue, Zhang Yiwei, Shuang Xuetao, Chen Yijian, Ha Jin, Liu Wenfei, Ken Liu, and Lu Nei.

Another year is over, and it's time again for us to recommend the year's best books.

Unlike in past years, we've dropped the five categories we'd used for three years running — humanities, business, science, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction — and split the recommendations into a fiction section and a nonfiction section.

For fiction, as we did last year, we again asked professional readers of fiction to recommend the best novels they read in 2018, hoping to give you some guidance for exploring the complexity and possibility that fiction holds. The books range from new releases to old ones; the only shared standard is that these professional readers consider them genuinely good novels. There are 13 contributors in all, of varying ages and backgrounds — from those born in the 1950s to those born in the 1980s, from writers and translators to scholars, book critics, and book editors. In a sense, that too is an expression of complexity and possibility.

This is the second installment of our full fiction list, and the contributors are mainly writers, editors, and book critics: Zhu Yue, Zhang Yiwei, Shuang Xuetao, Chen Yijian, Ha Jin, Liu Wenfei, Ken Liu, and Lu Nei.

Beyond 《度外》 and Rain 《雨》

Zhu Yue: writer and literary editor at Houlang, author of The Blindfolded Traveler 《蒙着眼睛的旅行者》, The Sleep Master 《睡觉大师》, and The Chaos of Fiction 《说部之乱》.

• Author: Huang Guojun
• Publisher: Houlang | Sichuan People's Publishing House
• Price: 45.00 yuan

The author, Huang Guojun, died at thirty-two. His father, Huang Chunming, once wrote a poem called "Guojun Isn't Coming Home for Dinner" that circulated widely online for a while, but few readers on the mainland have actually read Huang Guojun's own work.

Beyond is a cold, severe book, and very nearly a perfect story collection. Except for "Three Imagined Stories," his fiction is rarely built around "story" at all — the narrative isn't driven forward by plot but unfolds through shifting, circling points of view. Its most striking quality lies in its narrative technique and its sense of form.

The stories make heavy use of montage, flashback, and blank space, which makes you rethink the relationship between film and fiction. Fiction isn't limited to supplying film with "stories" — the two are equally arts of narrative, and in exploring narrative they can illuminate each other. If narrative is the conversion of one kind of time into another, then even a single instant can hold a narrative. That is why some of the frozen images in these stories, like a painting or a photograph, are charged with a sense of narrative.

The title story, "Beyond," breaks with the balance and clarity of the other pieces; its intricacy can leave a first-time reader dizzy. It gives up formal clarity for ambiguity, difficulty, and uncertainty, and feels strongly modern and experimental. I'd say "At a Loss" is the most perfect story in the book, and "Beyond" the strangest.

In Huang Guojun's work, a character's outward appearance — clothing, height, weight, beauty or ugliness — is almost entirely left out. What remains is identity, mostly identity based on family relationships, from which you can work out a character's age and gender. What he gives weight to instead is an interior point of view: not an external description of a person but a projection of a subject. The collection also makes us reconsider what a "character" means in fiction, and what it means for fiction to dig into a "subject."

• Author: Ng Kim Chew [Malaysia]
• Publisher: Houlang | Sichuan People's Publishing House
• Price: 38.00 yuan

Rain is an unusual book. It can't simply be filed as a story collection, because it holds together far too tightly for that, and yet it isn't a traditional novel either. It's more like a narrative labyrinth knotted and twisted together.

The book contains sixteen pieces. The first, "Rainy Day," is a poem; the other fifteen are fiction. Eight of them are specially numbered — Rain No. 1, Rain No. 2, on up to Rain No. 8. These eight aren't consecutive; unnumbered pieces are set between them. "Return" is unnumbered, but it's clearly bound up with the Rain series, a precursor and a point of reference that already shows the technique of multiple, or contradictory, narration.

The numbered pieces carry an air of mystery and suspense from the first line. Their protagonists are the parents and siblings of a single family (or their stand-ins), who in different combinations meet various fates of death or disappearance. The relationships among the stories are hard to explain, yet they leave a faint, lingering impression — one that brings to mind a concept from theoretical physics: the implicate order. All these ominous stories seem to be metaphors for the real world, reflecting the impermanence, mystery, and closed-off circumstances one ethnic community faces, and also showing its tenacity and its sorrow. After the terror comes an endless desolation.

Ng Kim Chew is a Malaysian Chinese writer, but he went to Taiwan to study young and has lived there for thirty years. Even so, he has always insisted on the identity of a "Mahua" (Malaysian Chinese) writer, and has never stopped attending to the Chinese community in Malaysia. So Rain is a work of tremendous imagination and modernist formal experiment that is at the same time deeply concerned with reality.

Interpreter of Maladies 《解说疾病的人》 and Swing Time 《摇摆时光》

Zhang Yiwei: writer and creative-writing teacher in the Chinese Department at Fudan University, author of New Tune 《新腔》, The Cherry and the Blue-Robed Maid 《樱桃青衣》, The Trials of Love in Journey to the West 《情关西游》, and other works.

• Author: Jhumpa Lahiri [United States]
• Translators: Lu Xiaohui, Wu Bingqing
• Publisher: Imaginist | Guangxi Normal University Press
• Price: 42.00 yuan

Jhumpa Lahiri has never once disappointed me, and to my mind she is one of the benchmarks of contemporary women's writing. I love Unaccustomed Earth. By date of writing, Interpreter of Maladies is the older book — Lahiri wrote it at thirty-two, the age I am now. In its nine stories you can see a thirty-two-year-old woman writer experimenting in fiction with marriage, trauma, diaspora, and with language itself.

"A Temporary Matter" is my favorite story in the book. Its structure resembles Eileen Chang's "Sealed Off": a confinement produced by accident, by a sudden event in the outside world. A young couple who once lived through a tragedy find that a power cut, of all things, lights up the rift between them. In that sense it's also a Manchester by the Sea story set in Baltimore. It's hard to believe that without the blackout this couple would have gone so long without sitting down to a meal together. Once the last of the passion is spent, a marriage starts to grind away at both partners' willpower. That erosion doesn't live only inside the relationship between the sexes; it also lives in two young people's slackness once they've lost their appetite for daily life. The story reads: "Nothing could get Shukumar to 'make an effort'; on the contrary, it struck him that he and Shoba were making more and more of an effort to avoid each other." They can recognize love clearly enough, recognize loss, recognize their own mediocrity and incapacity, recognize the lie that "making an effort" will get them anything out of life. The question is what to do next. Lahiri seems to be asking a good question.

On how people react under the pressure of great historical change, "When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine" catches with precision a kind of "life force" in ordinary people that can't quite be named. A man who in memory always came to eat with the family in a suit faces, day after day and with a calm expression, the danger of being cut off from his wife and daughters — behind him a war and blocked roads, at the table easy talk and laughter. In the face of enormous upheaval, people help each other, and even sitting together in silence seems to carry an extraordinary power. The story opens: "In the autumn of 1971 a man used to come to our house, with candy in his pocket and, in his heart, a thin hope of news that his family was alive." As in many countries at many singular moments in history, in the middle of that fracturing time everything looked so ordinary — the grown-ups still had candy in their pockets to amuse the children.

• Author: Zadie Smith [United Kingdom]
• Translator: Zhao Shujing
• Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
• Price: 65.00 yuan

Swing Time is a new book by the British writer Zadie Smith, born in 1975, and it was widely praised the moment it appeared. As a reading experience, quite a few loose threads still seem to dangle in it. But the writer keeps pushing at the edges of our stereotypes about women's writing, and that is a real delight. Just when you expect the friendship of two girls learning to dance to be as beautiful and romantic and Hana and Alice-like as such stories usually are, you are caught off guard by race, society, a left-wing mother, fame, and talent. So a dense, layered style may be a good thing: it means a woman writer has really seen how complicated the world is and has the appetite to take part in it. Rather than the stereotype, in which women are supposed to stay inside a world of flowers, tidying up the fragments of an emotional life, satisfied with describing a tiny warm space wrapped in a small love.

I started reading this novel as a model for how "female friendship" gets written. Male camaraderie has been written about so often in literature that "female friendship" is the one that lacks a literary order of its own. For most women, "friendship" is a game played in the inner chamber; however vividly it's described from within, it has little to do with the outside world. Given Zadie Smith's temperament, she clearly could not settle for that understanding, inside the novel or outside it. Mother and daughter, best friend and best friend — her women have to imitate and spur each other on, "sparing no effort to carve out a bit of living space of her own in this world." The value of that self-taught achievement may not stop at mastering a craft; it borrows the growth cycle of "learning a craft" to show a kind of "vigorous" life energy, and that energy, realized through the abstract art of dance, becomes a clearer, surer, more rhythmic force. She seems to be telling us that it's risky for women to throw themselves into the world, and that there's nothing to fear in it. Literature won't hand them a way out, but in choosing what material enters literature, women writers have a language of their own.

Please Take Your Seat at the Nerve Endings

Shuang Xuetao: writer, author of The Aviator 《飞行家》, Winged Ghost 《翅鬼》, Moses on the Plain 《平原上的摩西》, and other works.

I don't read much new fiction, and 2018 was no exception. I love rereading old books, which is probably laziness — an old book makes you feel safe, like a friend whose next line you already know by heart. So every time I'm asked to recommend the year's new books I feel a little ashamed, always aware of how thin my resources are. Most of the new books I do read come from friends. Now and then I'm led astray, but on the whole they can be trusted. If you try to read whatever the market is hyping you really can't keep up. Some people write very badly, but badly on a grand scale, and then you realize that in this era talent isn't easily buried — it's just sometimes in the wrong place.

CITIC put out a series called Penguin Little Black Classics, which I think is wonderful; I bought several sets to give away. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Rilke, Boccaccio, Flaubert and the rest, all slimmed down and packed into a little black box, a few short pieces per author. They're comfortable to read, not many words, and they give you a real sense of accomplishment — you finish one in no time. I don't need to explain what's good about these writers. I used to find Boccaccio dull, and only reading him this time did I find him interesting: quite bawdy, with no particular aim, simply telling a few stories of no great significance, yet lively, full of passion for this world instead of being bound to the next. I think it may be a reminder to those of us clever moderns that literature and "literariness" are two different things. Exactly why they're two different things, I can't say right now.

• Authors: Giovanni Boccaccio [Italy] / Edgar Allan Poe [United States] / Anton Chekhov [Russia] / Gustave Flaubert [France] / Yoshida Kenko [Japan] / Leo Tolstoy [Russia] / Rainer Maria Rilke [Austria] / Ryunosuke Akutagawa [Japan] / Thomas Hardy [United Kingdom] / William Blake [United Kingdom]
• Translators: Wen Jieruo / Cao Ying / Feng Zhi / Ma Ainong / Yu Xi / Wen Dong / Wen Zheng / Wang Jinxiao / Ru Long / Zhang Ling / Zhang Yang / Xie Wanrong / Zhang Chiheng
• Publisher: CITIC Press Group
• Price: 149.00 yuan

The other book I want to mention is Li: Time Capsule 《鲤·时间胶囊》, which holds some cultural essays and interviews, then a section of work by anonymous writers. The previous volume, Li: Anonymous Writers 《鲤·匿名作家》, carried anonymous work too; put the two together and you can see almost everything from that 2018 competition. When it launched I wondered who would enter. Wouldn't there be at least some hesitation? The doubt didn't last a week — I sat down and wrote a piece myself. Later I found that a lot of people had written fiction for it, and taken it seriously, including many writers I respect and love. That's when I understood that whatever the era, people who love to write still love to write and are still able to write; the chains the mundane world lays on us aren't as strong as we think, and given an opening, one light tug is enough to slip free and be yourself again. I read the top-ranked stories, and they were all good, each different from the others. Some of the eliminated pieces I liked a lot too — that's a matter of taste, not a ranking carved in stone. Some of the writing came from people outside serious literature and still had a high literary quality. So who was it that carved up a literary community that was all one family to begin with, leaving its members close enough to hear each other's roosters crow and yet never visiting in a lifetime? It's a shame Han Han doesn't write anymore. It's a shame there was no competition like this back when everyone was piling on to attack him — I believe what Han Han turned in wouldn't have been bad either, and he could at least have entered a piece under some other name, leaving no one anything to take aim at.

This year is nearly over. Good books keep multiplying, and literature hasn't gotten worse. Different people are doing different things; the era is paying attention to literature, and literature is paying attention to the era. Some people are still sitting there and have in fact already left the table; others are quietly flowing in, pouring their own strength into the nerve endings of a great river, a great sea. And that's pretty good, isn't it?

• Editor-in-chief: Zhang Yueran
• Publisher: Imaginist | Jiuzhou Press
• Price: 56.00 yuan

Normal People 《普通人类》 and Asymmetry 《不对称》

Chen Yijian: book critic and English-to-Chinese translator, whose translations include The Lost Salt Gift of Blood 《海风中失落的血色馈赠》, Satin Island 《撒丁岛》, and The Fall of Edward Barnard: The Complete Short Stories of Somerset Maugham, Vol. 1 《爱德华·巴纳德的堕落：毛姆短篇小说全集1》.

A muddled year from start to finish, with the upside only showing at the end: without noticing it I found myself chiming in with the online chatter of Anglo-American reading circles, and discovered that the two books I most enjoyed in 2018 happen to be their favorites too. So I checked with two Chinese-language editors, which conveniently and legitimately turns this recommendation into an announcement. I'm just here to tell you that the two English novels that dominated the year-end lists should both be readable in Chinese in 2019.

The first is Sally Rooney's Normal People. This woman, born in 1991, already carries the nickname "the Salinger of the Snapchat generation," though I think the two writers are temperamental opposites — rather like calling Bi Gan a feral Zhang Yimou. While I'm at it, I'll also recommend her 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends. Both books have very simple setups. The 2017 one follows two female university students, more or less lovers, who get tangled up with a couple in their thirties, the main line being the heroine's affair with the husband, out of which a delicate four-way relationship is woven. The 2018 one, Normal People, follows a man and a woman from high school to the end of university, each chapter jumping forward a few months, watching their bodies and souls drift together and apart. When this kind of novel is done well, the relationships shift subtly on nearly every page and grip you like a thriller; once readers know these characters they will certainly care enough to read to the back cover, so I won't say more. Space is limited, and I need to hurry up and get off topic.

The two things about Rooney's novels that pull me in are both rooted deep in my middlebrow, philistine tastes. The first can be put like this: however fine and high-minded literature is, in the end it still can't beat clever people saying clever things. Rooney has shaken off many of the labels of Irish literature with real flair, but that trust in talk, and that generosity toward it, remains solid — both novels are driven almost entirely by conversation. The two leads of Normal People study at Trinity College Dublin, where an older alumnus, Wilde, once said he'd sacrifice the truth at any moment for a witty line. But we all sense that saying something interesting tends to be closely tied to the truth. What it reveals isn't necessarily some bold-faced capital-T Truth, but a kind of interactive reality. Think back to the last conversation that genuinely made you happy: chances are it cut through some layer of things left unsaid, and at the very least it wasn't two people ignoring something unspeakable on the basis of a false consensus (in English this is called the elephant in the room). Of course we also know that absolute sincerity is a false idea, and Rooney moves easily between moving candor and laughable self-delusion — it isn't only her characters who sway between the two, but us readers as well. Living in an uninteresting era, we tend to assume that people who talk interestingly are covering something up. But precisely because Rooney's characters keep working to avoid saying anything trivial or beside the point, their desires, confusions, misunderstandings, heartaches, and happiness all feel more real. I don't think I've cared this much in a long time about whether the people in a novel are happy.

Most Anglo-American critics seem to agree that this book is a clear artistic advance on her first, Conversations with Friends; I don't find the gap that obvious, perhaps because the shock of the first book is still fresh. To me the fluency of the prose in both is the same fluency, made out of similar feeling in the author, so I still prefer to see them as one flowing whole. And the second thing that pulls me to Rooney lies in the two titles taken together, which seems to have to do with "normal" and "conversation." Rooney's characters seem to live in a fairy-tale world of human relations where the most ordinary piece of common sense is actually honored: that the responsibilities and obligations between two people are worked out between them, and have little to do with anyone else. To go back to the plot for a moment, the one key point is that their love life is a mess — and yet the two of them, in seeing each other, are not subject to the judgment of internet commenters, of the state, or of thousands of years of "that's just how it should be." How strange that is. Take the plainest secondary relationship in the book: at the start of Normal People, the male lead's mother is the cleaner in the female lead's house. Does that stop the two of them from understanding each other and quickly turning their friendship into a hookup? When the mother vaguely realizes her high-school-age son often has visitors in his bedroom, does she interrogate him, or intervene? To Rooney and those Irish characters, even asking such questions seems absurd. When the male lead treats the female lead badly under peer pressure, the mother insists on getting out of the car her son is driving her in, leaving him one line: "I'm ashamed of you." At that moment you know she doesn't need "I'm your mother" as the precondition for her logic — she's simply one person let down and hurt by another person she trusted. A novel certainly doesn't become sophisticated just by steering clear of national and family grievances, but there's still a low, spontaneous pleasure here, mostly envy, that lies outside literature: a novel like this reminds us that we don't have to set clever people against the state, their parents, education, mass media, or political correctness to make them interesting. Human beings on their own have enough beauty and enough flaws to make us want to read about them.

• Author: Sally Rooney
• Publisher: Faber & Faber

Speaking of campus fiction, one stock setup has always struck me as jarring: the girl with the best grades in class comes pre-loaded with bitch traits, which doesn't match my own experience at all. The ones I've known were mostly decent people, and that sense of security — that if she really sets her mind to something she'll probably pull it off — can even come across as charm.

Early in 2018 Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry left me with that same good feeling. The novel isn't set on a campus. It opens on the eve of the Iraq War, with a publishing assistant in her early twenties named Alice reading on a bench on a New York street. An old man who tells jokes turns up and buys her an ice cream from a street vendor. She recognizes him as a major novelist, thinks "a man who's won the Pulitzer several times probably won't poison me," eats the ice cream, laughs at the jokes, gives him her number, and before long becomes his lover. After the book came out, Halliday freely admitted in her first interviews that the old man was modeled on Philip Roth, and that this part of the story drew on her own relationship with him. The first half of Asymmetry is their love affair, and the overall flavor can only be called sweet; Halliday writes it so lightly, so naturally, that we forget what assumptions we brought into the story. Is a literary master falling in love with a naive young literary girl "exactly as it should be," or "astonishing that it happened at all"?

Then the second half opens and we can hardly be sure what we're reading. Without warning (though in fact the voice and rhythm of the narration have already changed beyond recognition), "I" becomes an Iraqi American economist, changing planes at London Heathrow on the way home to see his brother; because of the counterterrorism mood of the time, "I" seems to fall into a Kafkaesque bureaucratic black hole and is obstructed at every turn. As if worried the reader weren't disoriented enough, the waiting is interwoven with the narrator's memories of life in New York, London, and Iraq.

The book ends with a few pages of "epilogue," a fake BBC Desert Island Discs interview made up for the fake Roth. Only here do we get a big hint, and only then do we more or less grasp what the book is doing: the second story is probably the invention of the woman editor from the first part, who wants to write fiction, meant roughly to prove that imagination can live in any mind, however unrelated to your own outer life — while also overturning our earlier, rather lazy assumption, making us suspect that even the romance with the old writer may have an ambiguous relationship to reality. The structure of the novel is therefore charged with political positions. The novelist uses the gap between nations in the second part to light up the "asymmetry" of power in the first, where a successful male writer tries to control an unworldly young woman; and the very fact that Alice (and Halliday) wrote her novel points to that asymmetry being overturned.

All year Anglo-American reading circles talked about the book in those terms, but the novel isn't that combative — you can just as well read it as two beautifully made realist stories. To me it also feels unusually sunny. Right after Chinese New Year that year I went to Thailand quite aimlessly for three sun-soaked, tedious weeks, and the worst of it was that I had my small child with me, so every day I played endless rounds of hide-and-seek in a small, wide-open square. It was during those games that I finished the audiobook of Asymmetry. I wasn't especially thrilled at the time; only at year's end, seeing from various recommendations that it might be the most favored novel of 2018, did I read it properly again and notice how details from the first part seep, through the heroine's mind, into the fiction of the second — so that the structure isn't just a device for making an argument, but gives the whole book a flowing inner life.

Another reason the book has stayed bright in my memory is that its author so sincerely believes fiction can carry an idea — and the most conspicuous of those ideas happens to be the most upright piece of craft the novel has to offer: that however different people's outer identities, empathy and understanding between them are still possible. And she pulled it off, this lightly, in her own first novel. The other bright point deserves to be stated with emphasis: Halliday used a thoroughly Rothian move, putting her own affair with Roth into her first novel, and doing it so openly, so brilliantly, that the knowing, half-smirking anticipation in Anglo-American reading circles before publication had turned by year's end into near-unanimous praise. It's a heartwarming, inspiring story.

Roth died in May 2018, which for those of us who read him was also a good excuse to enjoy once more all the good material pouring in from every direction. There's an old BBC interview in which Roth returns to one of his familiar topics: of course a novelist uses his own life, but it goes through a meat grinder, and what comes out is a strange, misshapen patty. "As Flaubert also said: I am not a meat patty." Flaubert was neither a meat patty nor, as he himself claimed, Madame Bovary. Halliday is neither that Alice nor, as she herself claims, the Iraqi Jaafari, whose temperament is in fact closer to her own. The novelist is inside the grinder. Halliday is in every choice that let her produce a first novel like this one, and through the elaborate architecture of that novel we can clearly make out a naive yet worldly novelist who is remarkably good at whatever she turns her hand to.

• Author: Lisa Halliday
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Appendix: One More Reading List

Ha Jin: Chinese American writer who writes in English, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and winner of the National Book Award, among many other honors. Author of Waiting 《等待》, War Trash 《战争垃圾》, Nanjing Requiem 《南京安魂曲》, Under the Red Flag 《小镇奇人异事》, A Good Fall 《落地》, The Bridegroom 《新郎》, and other works.

The best novels I read in 2018 were Sigrid Nunez's The Friend and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer. The first is largely a meditation on life and writing, and also describes the friendship between a woman and a dog — a very wise novel. The second takes aim at the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese spy, in a prose style with an American kind of grandeur.

Liu Wenfei: professor in the Russian Department at Capital Normal University, professor in the Department of Foreign Literature at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, president of the China Russian Literature Research Society, and translator from Russian. Author of A History of Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry 《二十世纪俄语诗史》, Reading Pushkin 《阅读普希金》, and A Biography of Brodsky 《布罗茨基传》; translator of Selected Poems of Pushkin 《普希金诗选》, On Grief and Reason 《悲伤与理智》, Letters of Three Poets 《三诗人书简》, and Hope Against Hope 《曼德施塔姆夫人回忆录》.

Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes 《祖列伊哈睁开了眼睛》 by the Russian writer Guzel Yakhina, People's Literature Publishing House, 2017. I'm currently reading her My Children 《我的孩子们》 in Russian; the Chinese translation is due from October Literature and Art Publishing House in 2019.

Ken Liu: Chinese American science fiction writer and translator, author of The Dandelion Dynasty series 《蒲公英王朝》, The Algorithm for Love 《爱的算法》, and The Shape of Thought 《思维的形状》, and the translator into English of The Three-Body Problem 《三体》, Folding Beijing 《北京折叠》, and other works.

The most interesting science fiction I read in 2018 was Peter Tieryas's United States of Japan series (two books in all, and I believe there's a Chinese edition), and the non-science-fiction book I particularly loved was Lincoln in the Bardo.

(Note: New Star Press in mainland China has published the first book of the United States of Japan series as 《日本合众国》. The simplified Chinese rights to Lincoln in the Bardo have been acquired by Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, and it will be published in the future.)

Lu Nei: writer, author of Young Babylon 《少年巴比伦》, Tales from Flower Street 《花街往事》, Mercy 《慈悲》, and other works.

In fiction: Brother Yingwu 《应物兄》, Football 《足球》 (Jean-Philippe Toussaint), and By Night in Chile 《智利之夜》. Other books I read and thought were good: Tidings of the Book of Songs 《诗经消息》, The Cambridge Economic History of China 《剑桥中国经济史》, Breaking the Mold 《破格》, and Acting in Film 《电影中的表演》.

The cover image is a still from the film Boccaccio '70 《三艳嬉春》, via Douban.