Description:
A New York Magazine's Vulture Best Book of 2025
A provincial ambulance drives through the night in search of a hospital, a fifth-rate actor goes method as a hitman on a sweltering rooftop, a legendary knife fighter is found working on the factory floor of a northern village.Hunter's stories of deceptive, brutal realism play with myth and history, offering a vision of ordinary life in China with a magic realist turn.
Filled with dark humor and written with a tinge of noir, these fictions grapple with the realities of contemporary China, and show why Shuang Xuetao is the most highly-celebrated young writer working in the country today.
Granta Magazine Editions is a paperback original series of exceptional literary voices published by Granta magazine.
Brief description:
Shuang Xuetao was born in 1983 in
Shenyang. Shuang has written six volumes of fiction, for which he has
won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and
the Blancpain-Imaginist Award for best Chinese writer under forty-five.
His short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Astra Magazine and Brick, and a novella collection, Rouge Street, was published in English in 2022. His short stories and novellas have seen major adaptations for television and film.
Review Quotes: "Shuang Xuetao offers an unsparing portrait of life in China's industrial north-east. The Dongbei renaissance draws attention to places left behind by the nation's rise but also points to demand for honest, nuanced accounts of the real China." - The Economist