Byliner Launches Its New Byliner Fiction Imprint With Amy Tan's Rules for Virgins

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- In her new story Rules for Virgins - the first fiction she has published in six years - Amy Tan, beloved bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter's Daughter, tells the startlingly sensual tale of an aging master courtesan instructing her beautiful young protege in the ways of love and business in 1912 Shanghai.

(Photo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20111207/LA18089)

Tan's story, released on December 5, 2011, marked the debut of Byliner Fiction, the digital publisher that, since its launch last spring, has published a series of bestselling nonfiction Byliner Originals from Jon Krakauer, Ann Patchett, Taylor Branch, William Vollmann, Mark Bittman, and other distinguished and breakthrough authors.

Tan takes us deep into a world where skillful courtesans mercilessly compete for the patronage of wealthy gentlemen. For the women, the contest is deadly serious, a perilous game of economic survival that, if played well, can set them up for life as mistresses of the rich and prominent. There is no room for error, however: Erotic power is hard to achieve and harder to maintain, especially in the loftiest social circles. Enter veteran seducer, Magic Gourd, once one of Shanghai's "Top Ten Beauties" and now the advisor and attendant of Violet, an aspiring but inexperienced courtesan. Violet may have the youth and the allure, but Magic Gourd has the cunning and the knowledge without which the younger woman is sure to fail.

Her story is both humorous and heartbreaking, and the world of sexual intrigue that Tan reveals in Rules for Virgins is extraordinary. But this story is much more than seductive (and sometimes shocking) historical literary fiction: The intimate confessions of Magic Gourd add up to a kind of military manual for the War of the Sexes' female combatants. The wisdom conveyed is ancient, specific, and timeless, exposing the workings of vanity and folly, calculation and desire that define the mysterious human heart.

Amy Tan is the author of the bestselling novels The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, and Saving Fish from Drowning as well as The Opposite of Fate, a memoir. She is working on a new novel, The Valley of Amazement, to be published by Ecco.

Rules for Virgins is available for $2.99 in the Amazon Kindle Singles store, at BarnesAndNoble.com, as a Quick Read in Apple's iBook store and in the Google eBookstore.

SOURCE Byliner Inc.