I Live In The Slums Av Can Xue

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize   A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature   “There’s something inescapably cosmic about [Can Xue’s] writing: the grandness of her vision, the abstraction of her thought, the way the details of lived reality seem to shrink and assume an equal significance, as though one were orbiting a distant star and peering down.”—Bailey Trela, Los Angeles Review of Books   Can Xue’s stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend to limn a disordered and poetic state given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigor.   Combining elements of both Chinese materiality—the love of physical things—and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between