New Books In Literature

Will Buckingham‘s new book is a wonderful cycle of stories that are inspired by and speak back to the Chinese Yijing, the Classic of Changes. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw Books, 2015) collects 64 stories, one for each hexagram in the Yijing. Each story is introduced by a brief commentary that frames it, and these commentaries offer fascinating insights into the significance and genesis of the stories: they relate to aspects of the hexagrams that inspired them, Buckingham’s own travels and experience, research into Yijing scholarship and other aspects of Chinese studies, a broader universe of storytellers and their stories, and more. The pages of Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw Books, 2015) are full of amazing characters – emperors! Leibniz! windowsill gods! a bear on a bicycle! a smile artist! Fu Xi! – and it is difficult to put down once you start reading. The stories themselves are wonderful to read on their own, and Will generously read