Filled with dark humour and written with a tinge of noir, these stories grapple with the realities of life in contemporary China.
"Lu Dong moves the standing lamp, turns to gauge how far he is from the wall, then goes back to the chair he’d carefully positioned – no, never mind the chair, better to be prone on the floor. Pulling open the glass door, he steps out onto the balcony and extends a clothes-drying pole into the open air. Not heavy enough. That’s the most pressing problem – not the lamp, not the color of the floorboards, not the table in his peripheral vision distracting him from his target, but the pole’s insufficient weight."
Shuang Xuetao has written seven volumes of fiction, for which he has won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and the Blancpain-Imaginist Award for the best Chinese writer under forty-five. His short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Astra Magazine and Brick, and a collection of three novellas, Rouge Street, was published in English in 2022. His work has been adapted for both television and film. He lives in Beijing.
Paperback.
