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Autumn always comes so suddenly. A few days ago, the sun was emitting huge heat like a fire. After yesterday's drenching rain, today it is soft and weak. Autumn is here, the sky is higher, the river is clear, the earth is empty, and the trees are mottled. Autumn is the harvest season for farmers, and it is also a good time for city people to travel. However, I stayed at home during the entire October 1st holiday, watching movies online, playing games, and not wanting to go anywhere. My wife has scolded me more than once, saying that my whole body is rusty. I think so too, in addition to being sensitive to seasonal changes, my other sensory systems and nerve endings are numb and oxidized. A more orthodox statement is that I am losing my enthusiasm for a better life little by little, and I am also losing my love for this world. Not only is it being lost, but it has already been lost. The proof of this loss is that I have not read for a long time, let alone written.

The letter that came to my home from Hainan across thousands of rivers and mountains has been lying quietly on the table. Summer is coming. I sit in front of the window sill on the second floor every day, staring blankly at the sometimes gray and sometimes black sky, feeling sad. It has been raining these days, for ten days, from morning to night, without stopping for a moment. The weather forecast says that the rain will not stop within a week and will continue until early June. Everywhere in the house was wet and stained. The floor tiles looked like they had been splashed with oil and were slippery and shiny. The dining table and wooden chairs in the living room and the large wardrobe in the bedroom had grown a thick layer of white velvet. Even the pole of the wrought iron table lamp on the recently purchased bedside table was rusty. On the seventh day of rain, I felt like my whole body was starting to grow hair. Every day I kept wiping the exposed parts of my body with a dry towel, as if otherwise I would become a piece of wood or an iron rod.

In novels with animals as the main subjects, writers mostly use the mirror image of "the other" to reflect on themselves and the current situation, and see through the complexity of human society from a spiritual level. "The Greeting Card Is a Dog" talks about the dignity of humans and dogs. Dignity is part of human rights. For a Chinese, dignity is sometimes more important than life, and one of its manifestations is having face. This is true for humans, and it is also true for dogs who are closely connected with human emotions. The three games between this dog named He Ka and the village chief Zhao Dacheng were all based on face. Different from the general animal perspective novels, it is not limited to the dog's perspective, but examines human society from the dual perspectives of humans and dogs, revealing the absurdity of human social structure and the collapse of rural moral ethics.

The story of boy Yao Yuan and girl Jialing begins with a box of toothache. It was a box of ordinary toothache pills produced by a pharmaceutical factory in Tonghua, Liaoning Province, but in the eyes of the boy Yao Yuan, it was more than just a box of toothache pills worth four yuan, because it was the first gift he had received from a girl in his life. And in the eyes of the boy Yao Yuan, this box of Yatongan has clearly expressed a girl's concern and affection for him. This day was November 21, 2001. The boy Yao Yuan later told me that he would never forget this day until his death. In fact, it is very likely that Yao Yuan never forgot it until his death, although I tried my best to dissuade him from forgetting it.

Wizards and bandits were once the main actors on the magical stage of Xiangxi. This book takes the fateful entanglement between the wizard Zhao Tianguo and the bandit leader Long Dabang in western Hunan as the main line. It unfolds a grand narrative from a folk perspective and tells the historical changes in western Hunan from the late Qing Dynasty to the early 1950s. The ending of the novel is that the wizard and the bandit leader reunited in the prison of the People's Liberation Army. The two people who had always been at odds in the past have now reconciled. They discovered that in fact, they are opposites and mutually reinforcing each other, causing each other, just like two sides of life. Neither can live without one, otherwise life will be bleak.

Chen Buer is aging before he is old. Although he is forty-six or seventeen years old, he looks like he is fifty-eight or nine years old. He has a bald head, sparse eyebrows, droopy eyelids, sunken cheeks, and deep creases on his face. Although he is dressed in crisp old designer clothes, including a Septwolves jacket, a Hilton shirt, and Younger trousers, they can no longer reflect his former youthful, capable, and powerful demeanor. Like an old man, he has nothing to do every day. After lunch, he goes for a walk, walks along the river embankment, and weakly greets familiar old men or women he meets. He didn't say much to them, nodded and continued walking forward. Sometimes he would squat on the embankment and stare dreamily at the tall buildings on the other side of the river. Among them, the Shengshi Huating Building, the tallest and abrupt one, piercing the blue sky, was the place where his eyes stayed the longest. This twenty-six-story twin building was once his masterpiece and is still a landmark building in Youbei City.

Yu Huai'an, born in 1974, has worked as a farmer, wage earner, newspaper reporter, and editor of travel magazines and large literary journals. He has published novels "History of Maozhuang" and "Youth's Knot", a collection of short and medium stories "Far Away Sacrifice", a collection of short stories "I Want to Go South", etc. The day Zhao Xiaoming saw the shining railroad tracks was a warm late spring afternoon with clear skies and bright sun. On such a good day, standing at the southern foot of Jigong Mountain, you can see the hexagonal tower on the top of Yuping Peak in Youbei County, 60 miles away. Although we have never been to the county town, we often see that tower. It is not surprising. In our eyes, it is not much bigger than the one held in the hand of Li Tianwang in "Nezha Naohai". We are too lazy to look at it when we are herding cattle.