Rouge Street (Novellas)

Three Novellas

Rouge Street (Novellas)
Shuang Xuetao, Jeremy Tiang
RRP:
NZ$ 49.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 39.99
Hardback
h216 x 152mm - 240pg
19 Apr 2022 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781250835871
Out Of Stock
Currently no stock in-store, stock is sourced to your order
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY LITERARY HUB AND THE MILLIONSIntroduced by Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker finalist novel Do Not Say We Have NothingFrom one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers, three dazzling novellas of Northeast China, mixing realism, mysticism, and noir. An inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks. Rouge Street presents three novellas by Shuang Xuetao, the lauded young Chinese writer whose frank, fantastical short fiction has already inspired comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Located in China' s frigid Northeast, Shenyang, the author' s birthplace, boasts an illustrious past--legend holds that the emperor' s makeup was manufactured here. But while the city enjoyed renewed importance as an industrial hub under Mao Zedong, China' s subsequent transition from communism to a market economy led to an array of social ills--unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, suicide--that gritty Shenyang epitomizes. Orbiting the toughest neighborhood of a postindustrial city whose vast, inhospitable landscape makes every aspect of life a struggle, these many-voiced missives are united by Shuang Xuetao' s singular style--one that balances hardscrabble naturalism with the transcendent and faces the bleak environs with winning humor. Rouge Street illuminates not only the hidden pains of those left behind in an extraordinary economic boom but also the inspirations and grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.
An indelible introduction to Shuang' s work . . . lucidly translated by Jeremy Tiang . . . [Rouge Street] turns . . . from the powerfully realistic to the fantastical and surreal, in an existential theater reminiscent of Pirandello or Sartre . . . Shuang weaves with Dostoevskian skill the voices and experiences of the players in this drama . . . Through various monologues, the novella creates not just a suspenseful thriller, but a textured, rich portrait of a community over time. --Claire Messud, Harper' s MagazineRemarkable . . . enigmatic . . . The three novellas in Rouge Street, Shuang Xuetao' s prodigious English-language debut, feature multilayered voices revealing intricate perspectives that result in gloriously gratifying rewards . . . His crisp, unadorned sentences might seem to contrast his fantastical twists and turns, but that irresistible combination is waiting to be discovered by lucky new audiences. --Terry Hong, Shelf AwarenessShuang makes his English-language debut with three beautifully spare novellas exploring present day northeast China and the imprints of the past . . . Shuang sustains a cool, placid tone, even when reckoning with lingering traumas . . . Readers will be glad to get to know this rising star. --Publishers Weekly Set in Shenyang, a post-industrial city in the northeast of China, Xuetao' s novellas are as beautifully frigid and gritty as the city he writes about, as he inspects the dust left following an economic boom, and the things that percolate in spite of loss and unfulfilled promise. " --Literary HubShuang Xuetao presents a vivid picture that captures the various voices of Shenyang' s natives . . . Shuang' s stories are fundamentally about hope, aspiration, and resilience. " --The Millions Shuang Xuetao is a magician, suffusing failed lives with redemption and even delight. These are families out of Greek tragedy, rich intergenerational dramas reminiscent of Bi Feiyu' s Three Sisters, as evocative of a particular time and place in China, detailed and strange and heartbreaking. But above all the darkness is a lighter and more generous vision of people who can survive China' s great changes and yet still forgive, invent, and sail off into futures you would never expect. --David Vann, author of Aquarium and Caribou Island "The three novellas of Rouge Street give us an acerbic view of a chilly industrialized region, abject and desolate, tempered by Shuang Xuetao' s inability to form a petty thought and his generous, sometimes humorous tolerance of ambiguity. " --Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut and Miss Aluminum"What draws me to Shuang Xuetao' s work is his superlative language, his short, playful, muscular sentences. His down-to-earth narratives unfold at a leisurely pace, yet they remain powerful. The result is a singular mode of storytelling. " --Mo Yan, Nobel Prize-winning author of Red Sorghum"Shuang Xuetao is the most distinctive young Chinese writer. With lyrical language and uncanny narration, he expresses the intense love that literature has for humanity--especially its lowest order. To read his writing is to have your heart pierced, as well as to experience the power of art, which can be a beam of light slicing through the darkness. " --Yan Lianke, author of The Day the Sun Died"Shuang Xuetao' s meteoric rise in the last few years is a testament to the power of his writing. He has clearly been influenced by modernism--Wang Xiaobo, Hemingway and Murakami are all his mentors. " --David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, HarvardUniversity"We unanimously hailed the author' s adventurous spirit and thanked him for creating a literary magnetic field that teaches us new ways to spin. " --Su Tong, author of Raise the Red Lantern, in the citation for the 2020 Blancpain-Imaginist Award"Growing up amid the decay of China' s industrial base, Shuang Xuetao writes with a devastating sense of decline. His words may conform to conventional realism, yet they radiate a mysterious aura that cannot be dispelled. " --Yu Hua, author of To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
Shuang Xuetao is one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers. Born in 1983 in the city of Shenyang, Shuang has written several volumes of fiction, for which he has won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize for the best Chinese writer under forty-five. His short stories and novellas, including "Moses on the Plain," have been adapted into major television productions and feature films. Rouge Street is his first book to appear in English. Shuang lives in Beijing.
Status: No local stock, title imported to order
ISBN-13: 9781250835871
Published: 19 Apr 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: St Martin's Press
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Format: Hardback
Height: 216mm
Width: 152mm
Spine: 29mm
Weight: 313g
Pages: 240

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