Everyday Tang
Everyday Tang: On What We Can Learn From a Dynasty
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Xiaolu Guo will discuss her new book EVERYDAY DAY with the journalist and writer Patrick de Saint-Exupéry about the remarkable Tang dynasty in China and what it can teach us in today’s world.
EVERYDAY DAY
After decades living in England, writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo travelled to her native China with her daughter. Her objective was twofold: to show her eleven-year-old where she came from, and to discover what remained of an enigmatic period that had long fascinated her: the magnificent and cosmopolitan Tang Dynasty (618–907).
As they wander through the great cities of Xi’an and Luoyang, and cross the Wei and the Yangzi Rivers, Guo ponders the unique artistic, intellectual and social achievements of the Tang Dynasty and its influence on Western culture. Part travelogue, part historical reflection, Everyday Tang is a profound – and often startling – meditation on China’s Golden Age.
Xiaolu Guo is an award winning novelist and film director. She has published a dozen books with Random House. Her novels include A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Shortlisted for the 2007 Women’s Prize), and I Am China. Her memoir Once Upon A Time In The East won the National Book Critics Circle Award 2017 and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Her nonfiction Radical was published by Vintage 2023, followed by My Battle of Hastings. Her 2025 novel Call Me Ishmaelle is a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick, and it was the 2026 New York Times Editor’s Pick of the Month. She also directed several feature films including the Golden Leopard Winner She, a Chinese and MoMA New Directors’ selection We Went to Wonderland. Guo has been a visiting professor at Columbia University and CUNY in New York, and a Fischer Professor at the Free University in Berlin. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Xiaolu Guo was a 2018-2019 Fellow of the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
Winner of the Albert Londres Prize (1991) and the Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents, Patrick de Saint-Exupéry was a senior reporter at Le Figaro for nearly twenty years. His investigations into the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda and France’s role in it, particularly in L’inavouable (2004) and Complices de l’inavouable (2009), sparked widespread debate and several defamation lawsuits. Co-founder and editorial director of the magazine XXI, he launched 6 Mois in 2011, a quarterly publication devoted to photojournalism.
