The Nobel Literature Prizes are awarded to the persons who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction. The followings are some famous female winners in recent years.

Louise Glück

The Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2020. Childhood, family life, relationships and death are frequent themes in her collections. Gluck seeks out the universal. The rich English-language poetry tradition is her primary literary source of inspiration. Glück’s language is free of poetic formalities and she often uses daily spoken language.

Alice Munro

The Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2013. Alice Munro has devoted her literary career mostly to short stories. The underlying themes of her work are often relationship problems and moral conflicts. The relationship between memory and reality is another frequent theme she uses to create tension. She is able to demonstrate the impact that seemingly small events can have on a person’s life.

Herta Müller

The Nobel Prize winner in Literature 2009. Her works are rooted in her experiences as one of Romania’s German-speaking racial minority. Müller describes how dictatorship (独裁) causes a fear and sense of distance that stays in an individual’s mind. With precise language, she recalls images from the past.

Svetlana Alexievich

She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. Svetlana Alexievich represents life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. Personal experiences have been an important part for her works. She uses interviews to create a picture of a wide range of voices. With her “ documentary novels ” , Alexievich moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction.

Pastime is a bi-monthly magazine for curious young minds. Many of the topics we write about won’t be covered in the classroom. All the articles are written in a lively style, and each one is paired with drawings by some of the country’s most talented artists.

♦ History focuses on archaeological (考古的) sites around the world where archaeologists work to unearth important finds.

♦ World includes stories about daily life, folk tales, and history and traditions of the people and places.

♦ Sport includes nutrition tips, information about up-and-coming young athletes, and sports events.

♦ Art stimulates a child’s cultural life, from film to theatre through to writing and music.

On top of all that, Pastime is packed with items to stimulate a youngster’s imagination, including pages of puzzles and a step-by-step guide to creating their own impressive-looking drawings.

In every issue, we review the latest books top authors write for youngsters. There are also short works of fiction written especially for Pastime by some of our best writers.

We know that children at this age are dealing with many emotions and sometimes difficult feelings, so we have a personal advice page to reply to questions dealing with personal and moral problems.

Unlike many of today’s throwaway comics, Pastime is written and designed to be kept and treasured. We know children love going online — but we also know how much they enjoy holding a printed magazine in their hands, and the excitement they get when each new issue drops through the letterbox personally addressed to them.

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The Joy Luck Club explores the connection, or lack of, between immigrant Chinese mothers and their Chinese American daughters. The book is divided into four sections in which the tales of mothers and daughters connect.

The book begins with Jing-mei taking her mother's place playing mahjong at a weekly gathering. They call the group the Joy Luck Club. Jing-mei's mother had a similar club in China before Jing-mei was born. Her mother restarted the tradition in San Francisco when Jing-mei was just a little girl. The other members of the group, Lindo, Ying-ying and An-mei, were her mother's oldest friends. The women tell Jing-mei that before her mother, Suyuan, died, she had finally succeeded in locating Jing-mei's lost half-sisters in China. Suyuan had abandoned the girls when she fled during World War Ⅱ. The women offer to help Jing-mei travel to China, meet her sisters and tell them about their mother. Jing-mei is overcome with emotion and wonders if she is up to the task. Then each woman tells an emotional story from her own childhood. The women then wonder if their daughters can really understand them.

In the second section, the four daughters Waverly, Jing-mei, Lena and Rose share painful childhood stories about their relationships with their mothers. The stories contain misunderstandings of their mother's actions.

In the third section, the daughters share about their marriage and career troubles. They believe that their mothers' old-fashioned ideas do not apply to their American lives. But their quest for solutions to their troubles leads them back to their relationships with the older generation.

In the last section, the mothers tell current stories about their daughters and their attempts to help them solve their problems. In doing so, they learn more about themselves. Jing-mei travels to China, meets her half-sisters and help them to learn about a mother they cannot remember. In doing so, she fulfills her mother's wish to be reunited with her lost daughters. This helps Jing-mei understand and appreciate her mother better. Jing-mei's journey also helps the other members of the Joy Luck Club. They see the importance of the past and the present as they work to truly connect with their daughters.