This is a new novel from Xu Bing, one composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the Ground. The result is a readable story without words, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of "Mr. Black," a typical urban white-collar worker. His day is recounted with meticulous and intimate detail, and reads like a postmodern, post-textual riff on James Joyce's account of Bloom's peregrinations in Ulysses. But Xu Bing's narrative, using an exclusively visual language, could be published anywhere, without translation or explication; anyone with experience in contemporary life, anyone who has internalized the icons and logos of modernity, from smiley faces to transit maps to menus can understand it.

Cambridge, Massachusetts 2014, 22.7 x 15.8 cm, illustrated, 128pp. Hardback.