* Can Xue - Novels and Short Fiction (10 books)
CAN XUE, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua (b. 1953) , is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic. Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She is considered by many to be the most spirited, fearless, and radical experimentalist to come out of modern China in a generation. She is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Cultural Revolution played a catastrophic role in her childhood and influenced the direction of her work. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Throughout this period, her entire family "struggled along on the verge of death."
Can Xue's abstract style and unconventional narrative form attracted a lot of attention from critics in the 1990s. A variety of interpretations of her work have been published, but political allegory has been the most popular way of understanding her early short stories. Many of the images in her stories have been linked to the Cultural Revolution and other turbulent political movements of the early People's Republic, although direct references to these events are uncommon. The author herself explicitly denies most forms of political commentary others claim to have found in her work, stating once in an interview, "There is no political cause in my work." On the contrary, Can Xue says she treats each story as a kind of life experiment in which she is the subject. "In very deep layers," she says, "all of my works are autobiographical."
Her stories unfold with an eerie intensity. She is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The lyrical short stories in THE EMBROIDERED SHOES (1997) and VERTICAL MOTION (2011) explore themes central to our contemporary lives (mortality, memory, imagination, and alienation) and build into philosophical and psychological conundrums that we ponder long after reading the final page.
In the darkly comic novel LOVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM , longlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion, and each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. FIVE SPICE STREET (1988) tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.
The following books are in ePub and/or PDF format as indicated:
== NOVELS ==
* Barefoot Doctor (Yale, 2022) – ePub + PDF
* Five Spice Street (Yale, 2009) – ePub + PDF
* Frontier (Open Letter, 2017) – ePub
* The Last Lover (Yale, 2014) – ePub + PDF
* Love in the New Millennium (Yale, 2018) – ePub + PDF
== NOVELLAS & SHORT STORIES ==
* Dialogues in Paradise (Northwestern, 1989) – ePub + PDF
* The Embroidered Shoes (Holt, 2015) – ePub
* I Live in the Slums (Yale, 2020) – ePub + PDF
* Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas (Northwestern, 1991) – PDF
* Vertical Motion (Open Letter, 2011) – ePub
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