There is something to be said about leaving reality behind for a bit. These works of fiction will take you around the world and beyond. “If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue.” —Susan Sontag “[Can Xue] invites comparison to the century’s masters of decay
Can Xue— I live in the slums. I didn’t settle firmly on one place to live. I could stay anywhere as long as it had a stove. This area produces coal: all the homes used coal to keep fires burning at night. I just lay in a corner of the
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is celebrating acclaimed female authors from around the globe. As part of Margellos’ mission to bring previously overlooked poetry and prose into the English-speaking world, we are proud to make accessible the most influential female voices of our time. Here’s a roundup of a
Annelise Finegan Wasmoen— Across interviews and essays, the experimental writer Can Xue characterizes her fiction in two ways that speak to what are also questions about translation: as, at once, the embodied performance of freedom, and, at the same time, as an automatic process predicated by a logic or mechanism.
John Donatich— “Can modern man, in today’s society, still fall in love?” This seems to me the central question in the work of Can Xue. Granted, this might come as a surprise—that a writer who is so rigorously experimental and unapologetically demanding is obsessed with such a personal concern. But