Introduced by Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker finalist novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing
From 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 Chinaâs frigid Northeast, Shenyang, the
authorâs birthplace, boasts an illustrious pastâlegend holds that the emperorâs makeup was manufactured here. But while the city enjoyed renewed importance as an industrial hub under Mao Zedong, Chinaâs subsequent transition from communism to a market
economy led to an array of social illsâunemployment, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, suicideâthat 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 Xuetaoâs singular styleâone 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 inspiration and grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.