Can Xue

Viie Vürtsi tänava elanikele ei anna rahu küsimus, kes on nende seas kihinat-kahinat tekitav salapärane madam X. Nende lõputud oletused on põimunud romaaniks, milles segunevad poliitiline mõistulugu ja sürreaalne fantaasia. Kes ta on? Kuidas on tal õnnestunud Viie Vürtsi tänava head inimesed oma pilli järgi tantsima panna? Tundmatu jutustaja püüab jääda lõputute nägemuste, argumentide ja arvamuste kakofoonias erapooletuks, kuid uurimine ei lakka ning tänaval vallandub spekulatsioonidest ja eelarvamustest juhitud nõiajaht. Ehkki inimesed üritavad madam X-i seletamatutele võimetele jälile saada, on naine nagu peegel, mille mõjul paljastuvad nende endi hing ja olemus. Kirjanik ja kriitik Can Xue on üks tänapäeva kõige hinnatumaid Hiina autoreid. Tema avangardne looming on murdnud varasemate kaasaegsete hiina kirjanike realismitraditsiooni ja tõlgitud paljudesse maailma keeltesse. "Viie Vürtsi tänav" on viimase kahekümne aasta üks erakordsemaid Hiina romaane.

Jag bor i slummen är en samling berättelser om att existera i utkanten. Här kilar en råtta från hus till hus i de trånga fattigkvarteren, där den möter de besynnerliga varelser som lever tillsammans i dunklet. I staden bygger en skata stolt sitt bo och grubblar över sina mänskliga grannar som han aldrig helt kommer att förstå. Och i trädgården söker ett försummat pilträd efter näring – det sträcker sina rötter djupt ned i den karga jorden. I detta surrealistiska och poetiska landskap är identitet och verklighet ständigt under omförhandling. Can Xue skriver fram en plats som är både bekant och gåtfull och som inte endast befolkas av människorna.

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardThe thirteen stories in this collection are vintage Can Xue. Similar to her novels (The Last Lover, Frontier) and other collections (Vertical Motion) the focus is less on what happens and more on the experience of reading. "Mother River" is a short bildungsroman of a young man who decides to become a fisherman (and crafter of spherical maps) and discovers that performing the role itself is more important than the number of fish they catch. Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue's status as one of the most reward and complex writers working today--and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.

Denna samling av sexton noggrant utvalda berättelser av Can Xue visar den dolda litterära värld hon har skapat. Can Xue använder ett enkelt, klart och poetiskt rikt språk för att utforska de mörka och vidsträckta gränserna av sin egen och människans själ. Genom sina karaktärer tolkar hon heroismen och romantiken i det vardagliga livet och hyllar varje individs själs komplexitet och oförklarlighet.

I denna kalejdoskopiska roman lever en grupp kvinnor i ett samhälle där konspirationerna och paranoian lurar bakom varje hörn, liksom magin. På traktens bomullsfabrik utnyttjades många men lyckades fly, för att nu, nöjda, arbeta på en bordell. En ung änka som längtar efter sin älskare reser till sin kusin på landsbygden, där nätterna innebär en tillvaro nära de döda. Andra uppsöker en plats där traditionell kinesisk medicin kan omskapa jaget. Alla försöker de navigera mellan olika kärlekar och de begravda hemligheter som omger deras liv. Med en outgrundlig, drömlik klarhet, mot bakgrund av handel och industri, bedrägeri och exploatering, skriver Can Xue fram en fascinerande berättelse om sex och romantik för vår tid.

Språk: kinesiska In Montgomery, imagination and reality alternate strangely. Several young people hiding in the city are reading lovers. Among them, Xiao Sang, when she is immersed in literature, the fictional world appears mysteriously: the streets and alleys at night are suddenly filled with the breath of the distant sea; The leopard sneaks in and out of the museum... The book summons some things, the mentor appears, the old people reunite, the love grows, and life is exactly what it imagined. Now, a new book awakens the soul's passion for adventure with unprecedented complexity and depth.

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 “There’s something inescapably cosmic about [Can Xue’s] writing: the grandness of her vision, the abstraction of her thought, the way the details of lived reality seem to shrink and assume an equal significance, as though one were orbiting a distant star and peering down.”—Bailey Trela, Los Angeles Review of Books 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.

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 The most ambitious work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest writers “In this dreamlike novel . . . amid increasingly bizarre scenarios, appearances give way to hidden, otherworldly layers.”—New Yorker In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and conspiracies abound. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello, underground ancestral homes, or Nest County, where traditional medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Can Xue’s mesmerizing storytelling traces love’s many guises—satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling—against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, and sex and romance drawn from the East and the West.

New Novel from the Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIntroduction by Porochista Khakpour." One of the most raved-about works of translated fiction this year"--Jonathan Sturgeon, FlavorwireFrontier 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.

From the sensational Chinese author who has been called “a new world master,” a Kafkaesque novel set in a fictional Western nation Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature “[A] mind-bending novel. . . . Xue succeeds in creating a unique, immersive, tale of ‘intersecting dreamworlds.’”—Publishers Weekly In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.” Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.

The first full-length novel by Chinese author Can Xue to appear in English “There’s no other writer in China like Can Xue . . . strange, surreal, and very compelling . . . [and] this novel is probably the best place to start.”—Chad Post, Publishers Weekly Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old, others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless interplay of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, as the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices. Madam X is a vehicle whereby the people bare their souls, through whom they reveal themselves even as they try to penetrate the mystery of her extraordinary powers. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day—whether in China or in the West—where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.

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."