Translated journal articles, available in English for the first time.

Officially founded in 1978, the Beijing Dance School was the first professional dance school established after the creation of the People’s Republic of China. In the years since, the Beijing Dance Academy has become the only institution of higher learning for professional dance education in the country, as well as the largest prestigious dance school in the world. It is a full-time institution of higher learning with commitments to developing excellent professional dancers, choreographers, and dance researchers. Dance Studies in China is a collection of articles selected from issues of the Journal of Beijing Dance Academy, the only academic journal of dance studies in China. The collection also includes an interview with Shen Wei, the Chinese American choreographer, painter, and director living in New York.

In 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler, a German exile writing for a British newspaper, was arrested by Nationalist forces in Málaga. He was then sentenced to execution and spent every day awaiting death—only to be released three months later under pressure from the British government. Out of this experience, Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, his most acclaimed work in the United States, about a man arrested and executed in a Communist prison.

Dialogue with Death is Koestler’s riveting account of the fall of Málaga to rebel forces, his surreal arrest, and his three months facing death from a prison cell. Despite the harrowing circumstances, Koestler manages to convey the stress of uncertainty, fear, and deprivation of human contact with the keen eye of a reporter.