In 1995, the young Taiwanese woman writer Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in Paris’s Montmartre district, leaving behind the autobiographical novel LAST WORDS IN MONTMARTRE. Two decades later, the novel was published in English by the prestigious New York Review Books, bringing Qiu renown in Western literary circles and quickly prompting translations into other European languages. Qiu is considered the first openly lesbian novelist in the history of Chinese literature; her debut novel, NOTES OF A CROCODILE, became a “Bible” for the Taiwanese lesbian community and an underground classic in T...