Can Xue - Love in the New Millennium and other works (6 books)

CAN XUE, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua (b. 1953) , is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic, considered by many to be the most spirited, fearless, and radical experimentalist to come out of modern China in a generation. Most of her work remains untranslated into English.

The Cultural Revolution played a catastrophic role in her childhood and influenced the direction of her work. Her father was jailed as a rightist, and her mother and two brothers were sent to the countryside for re-education through labor. Throughout this period, her entire family "struggled along on the verge of death."

Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. Her abstract style and unconventional narrative form attracted much attention from critics in the 1990s. Direct reference to turbulent political moments in the early People's Republic are uncommon in her work, and Can Xue has explicitly denied most forms of political commentary others claim to have found in her work. On the contrary, Can Xue says she treats each story as a kind of life experiment in which she is the subject: "In very deep layers, all of my works are autobiographical."

Can Xue's stories unfold with an eerie intensity. She is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The lyrical short stories in VERTICAL MOTION and THE EMBROIDERED SHOES explore themes central to our contemporary lives (mortality, memory, imagination, and alienation) and build into philosophical and psychological conundrums that we ponder long after reading the final page.

In the darkly comic novel LOVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM, longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion, and each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. FIVE SPICE STREET tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise indicated:

* Embroidered Shoes, The (Holt, 2015). Ronald Janssen and Jian Zhang, trans.
* Five Spice Street (Yale, 2009). K. Gernant and C. Zeping, trans. -- ePUB + PDF
* Frontier (Open Letter, 2017). Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, trans.
* Interview with Can Xue (asymptotejournal.com) -- PDF
* Last Lover, The (Yale, 2014). Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, trans.
* Love in the New Millennium (Yale, 2018). Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, trans.
* Vertical Motion (Open Letter, 2011). Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping, trans.

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