A selection of harsh, sometimes violent, and often surreal stories by the premier young avant-garde Chinese woman writer. A couple moves with their young daughter to the seaside, only to be terrorized by hostile townsfolk, predatory seabirds, and the persistent sound of the waves. Two old friends spend their waning days traipsing amongst ruined walls, imagining bubbling brooks and lush marshland. An old man lives atop a bizarre wooden building in the clouds, where he is served pancakes by a hostile youth. These are the scenarios of just some of the stories in this generous new collection by Can Xue. Although rooted in the folk traditions of Chinese literature and the real conflicts of contemporary Chinese life, Can Xue's stories exist in a separate space and time where dreams and reality coalesce: tenderness quickly turns to violence, strange diseases are caught, and quaint landscapes become phantasmagorical. Can Xue's literary world is inhabited by ghosts, dying old men, street urchins, cobblers, farmers, cats, rats, and stray dogs. Much influenced by Borges, Kafka, and Bruno Schulz, this new collection of Can Xue's surreal stories confirms The New York Times' assessment that "reading Can Xue's fiction is like running downhill in the dark; you've got momentum, but you don't know where you're headed."

Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories (New Directions Paperbook)

Xue, Can

Chen, Zeping

Gernant, Karen

Reference

New Directions

In celebration of Conjunctions' 40th issue, the journal has gathered together fiction, poetry, plays and creative essays by some of its favorite contemporary writers. Featuring novels in progress from authors including Richard Powers, Howard Norman, Paul Auster and Lois-Ann Yamanaka, as well as “Heli,” a surreal novella by China's foremost fiction writer, Can Xue, in which a boy falls in love with a girl who lives entrapped in a glass cabinet from which he must free her. Short fiction by writers such as Rikki Ducornet, William T. Vollmann, William H. Gass and Diane Williams appears, in addition to “Condition,” a harrowing story by Christopher Sorrentino, based on historical events from the 1970s, charting the psychological disintegration of a female newscaster who, on her last day alive, methodically plots her suicide on live TV. 40x40 also features creative nonfiction by David Shields and Eliot Weinberger, poetry by Cole Swensen, Martine Bellen, John Ashbery, Lyn Hejinian and Robert Creeley, and a visual poem by Tan Lin. Rounding out this diverse celebration of contemporary work is a previously unpublished play by Joyce Carol Oates, specially commissioned for this anniversary issue, and a lively full-color portfolio of new work by Russian emigré artist Ilya Kabakov.

Conjunctions: 40, 40X40

Literature & Fiction

POWERS, RICHARD

Yamanaka, Lois-Ann

Hejinian, Lyn

AUSTER, PAUL.

OATES,JOYCE CAROL

Ashbery, John.

Contemporary

Bard College

The White Review is an arts and literature quarterly magazine, with triannual print and monthly online editions. The magazine launched in London in February 2011 to provide 'a space for a new generation to express itself unconstrained by form, subject or genre', and publishes fiction, essays, interviews with writers and artists, poetry, and series of artworks. It takes its name and a degree of inspiration fromLa Revue Blanche, a Parisian magazine which ran from 1889 to 1903.

The White Review No.30 (White Review, 30)

Samatar, Sofia

Omarsdottir, Kristin

Ford, Laura Grace

Yu, Jessica

Arts & Photography

Fitzcarraldo Editions

"There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue."—Robert Coover
Two young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs . . .
Can Xue 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 stories in this striking and lyrical new collection—populated by old married couples, children, cats, and nosy neighbors, the entire menagerie of the everyday—reaffirm Can Xue's reputation as one of the most innovative Chinese writers in a generation.
Can Xue is a pseudonym meaning "dirty snow, leftover snow." She learned English on her own and has written books on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante. Her publications in English include, The Embroidered Shoes, Five Spice Street, and Blue Light in the Sky, among others.
Karen Gernant is a professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University. She translates in collaboration with Chen Zeping.
Chen Zeping is a professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Teachers' University, and has collaborated with Karen Gernant on more than ten translations.

Vertical Motion

Short Stories & Anthologies

Open Letter

New Novel from the Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award
Introduction by Porochista Khakpour.
"One of the most raved-about works of translated fiction this year"―Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire
Frontier opens with the story of Liujin, a young woman heading out on her own to create her own life in Pebble Town, a somewhat surreal place at the base of Snow Mountain where wolves roam the streets and certain enlightened individuals can see and enter a paradisiacal garden.
Exploring life in this city (or in the frontier) through the viewpoint of a dozen different characters, some simple, some profound, Can Xue's latest novel attempts to unify the grand opposites of life--barbarism and civilization, the spiritual and the material, the mundane and the sublime, beauty and death, Eastern and Western cultures.
A layered, multifaceted masterpiece from the 2015 winner of the Best Translated Book Award, Frontier exemplifies John Darnielle's statement that Can Xue's books read "as if dreams had invaded the physical world."
Can Xue is a pseudonym meaning "dirty snow, leftover snow." She learned English on her own and has written books on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante. Her publications in English include The Embroidered Shoes, Five Spice Street, Vertical Motion, and The Last Lover, which won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.
Karen Gernant is a professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University. She translates in collaboration with Chen Zeping.
Chen Zeping is a professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Teachers' University, and has collaborated with Karen Gernant on more than ten translations.
Porochista Khakpour is the author of two novels, Sons and Other Flammable Objects and The Last Illusion.

Frontier

Literary

Mother River

La frontera

Genre Fiction

Hermida Editores S.L.

Hojas rojas

Aristas Martínez Ediciones

Al otro lado

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