Like a small craft putting out to sea, we seek not to prevail through size or tonnage, but through a light, quiet, and unhurried bearing—carrying voices of a pure and singular beauty, and allowing them to travel into the wider world of literature.
Works
Justitia in a Toga
Author: Tacita Y.
Translator: Ivy Wang
Genre: Novel (Alternative History, Legal Drama, Classical Literature)
ISBN: 978-988-78113-5-0
A courtroom fantasia from ancient Rome
An absurdist legal drama
A vivid tableau of urban life
In the age of the Roman Principate, an unscrupulous civil-law advocate and his enchanting female clerk engage in battles of wits in the courtroom as they confront a series of eccentric and unimaginable lawsuits, exhausting every possible strategy.
Through a collection of bizarre, humorous, touching, and intricately plotted cases, this novel vividly sketches a historical and cultural panorama of ancient Rome that is at once serious and playful, splendid yet nuanced, capturing both its grandeur and its everyday life. A host of characters—some real, some fictitious, and some hovering somewhere in between—come vividly to life in this reconstruction and homage to the splendor and madness of ancient Rome.
Created through the close collaboration of a contemporary Chinese woman author and a woman translator, the novel features exquisite and sophisticated prose, richly drawn and vivid characters, and a story full of intrigue, warmth, and depth. Although the story unfolds in a deliberately fictionalized historical interval, the author’s research is rigorous and exacting. Scenes and objects are rendered with striking immediacy, bringing the many facets of ancient Roman social life before the reader with color, texture, and vitality. This work showcases the beauty of thought and eloquence, brims with poetic and pictorial charm, and touches upon the subtle, complex, humorous, and sublime dimensions of history and human nature.
