Zeping Chen

Canxue

Karen Gernant

Two young girls sneak into 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 neighbour's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who recieves a mysterious visitor while he is aleep. After a ten year absence a young man visits his uncle on the 24th floor of a high rise floating in the air. Can Xue is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality meet.

Stories

Vertical Motion

A series of short stories features such offbeat characters as a doctor-detective-warrior who sleeps like a hippo in a cistern and a homicidal maniac housewife whose husband ends up in the hospital with a stomach full of needles.

The Embroidered Shoes

fiction collection of Can Xue

Double life

Tsʻan-hsüeh

Tsan-hsueh

Can Xue draws the reader into a world of the grotesque and the surreal, of uncertain spaces and indeterminate identities, of sexual menace and psychological disorientation. These novellas are about life in post-Mao China, but not the China of social realism or of Western fantasy. At the forefront of China's new literary trends, these two novellas--"Yellow Mud Street" and "Old Floating Cloud"--explore Chinese reality through images of the absurd, sudden and illogical juxtapositions, and the limitless transformations induced by a unique imagination.

Two Novellas

Old Floating Cloud

A collection of tales rooted in Chinese folk traditions and contemporary issues includes the stories of a family's victimization by hostile townspeople and elements from their new seaside home, the imaginative walking journeys of a pair of friends, and an elderly man's life in a cloud-covered wooden building where he is served pancakes by a hostile youth. Original.

Canxue

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