I Live in the Slums: Stories - Hardcover

by Can Xue (Author), Karen Gernant (Translator), Zeping Chen (Translator)

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature

Can Xue's stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor.

Combining elements of both Chinese materiality--the love of physical things--and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and oblivion. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and can make us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us. Delightful, enchanting, and filled with secrets, Can Xue's newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality.

Author Biography

Can Xue is the pseudonym of the renowned avant-garde author Deng Xiaohua. Her previous works include Five Spice Street, Vertical Motion, The Last Lover, Frontier, and Love in the New Millennium.Karen Gernant is professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University. Chen Zeping is professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou.