【推荐3】The cheongsam is a female dress with distinctive Chinese features and enjoys a growing popularity in the international world of high fashion.

The name “cheongsam”, meaning simply “long dress”, entered the English vocabulary from the dialect of China’s Guangdong Province(Cantonese). In other parts of the country including Beijing, however, it is known as “Qi Pao”, which has a history behind it.

When the early Manchu rulers came to China properly, they organized certain people, mainly Manchus, into “banners” (qi) and called them “banner people”(qi ren), which then became loosely the name of all Manchus. The Manchu women wore normally a one-piece dress which, like-wise, came to be called “qi pao” or “banner dress”. Although the 1911 Revolution toppled the rule of the Qing(Manchu) Dynasty, the female dress survived the political change and, with later improvements, has become the traditional dress for Chinese women.

Easy to slip on and comfortable to wear, the cheongsam fits well the female Chinese figure. Its neck is high, collar closed, and its sleeves may be either short or full-length, depending on season and taste.

The dress is buttoned on the right side, with a loose chest, a fitting waist, and slits up from the sides, all of which combine to set off the beauty of the female shape.

The cheongsam is not too complicated to make. Nor does it call for too much material, for there are no accessories like belts, scarves, sashes or frills to go with it.

Another beauty of the cheongsam is that, made of different materials and to varying lengths, they can be worn either on casual or formal occasions. In either case, it creates an impression of simple and quiet charm, elegance and neatness. No wonder it is so much liked by women not only of China but of foreign countries as well.

【推荐2】Kafka was hired in an Italian insurance company on November 1, 1907. He worked there for a year, during which period his letter witnessed that he was unhappy with his working time schedule — from 8 pm until 6 am — as it made it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his writing. On July 15, 1908, he resigned, and two weeks later he got employed by the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute. Both in his letter and his diaries, Kafka frequently complained about his life at work.

Though Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts that left no time for writing, he was promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, and he worked from 8:30 am until 2:30 pm. Then he had lunch around 3:00 pm, slept until 7:30 pm, did some exercise and had a family dinner, after which he started work around 11:00 pm (the letter-and diary-writing took up at least one hour a day, and more usually two). “Depending on my strength, inclination and luck, until one, two, or three o’clock, once even till six in the morning.” This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse. It would be wrong, however, to consider him a long-suffering official depressed by his work or even found it detestable. On the contrary, he was a model official, precise and efficient, who successfully climbed the career ladder.

Kafka is one of the highest regarded writers of the German language, although he achieved little to no fame during his own lifetime. During his lifetime, Franze Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, mysterious works were gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th century literature.

【推荐3】The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, for his concern for refugees (难民) between cultures and continents. Gurnah, 72, is the first black writer to receive the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and some observers saw his selection as a corrective after years of European and American Nobel winners.

Growing up in Zanzibar, Abdulrazak Gurnah never considered the possibility that he might one day be a writer. “It never occurred to me,” he said in an interview. Then, in 1964, a violent protest forced Gurnah, when he was 18, to escape to England. Poor and homesick,he began to write something about home in his diary, then longer passages, then stories about other people. Those reflections, the habit of writing to understand and document his own lives, eventually gave rise to his first novel, then nine more. They include Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way and Dottie, which all deal with the immigrant experience in Britain; Paradise shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994, about a boy in an East African country hurt by colonialism; and Admiring Silence，about a young man who leaves Zanzibar for England, where he marries and becomes a teacher.

The news of Gurnah’s Nobel was celebrated by fellow novelists and academics who have long argued that his work deserves a wider audience. His longtime editor, Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury, said Gurnah’s win was “most deserved” for a writer. “He is one of the greatest living African writers, and no one has ever taken any notice of him and it’s just killed me. I posted a video on the social network last week and in it I said that he was one of the people that had been just ignored. And now this has happened,” she said.