★ 06/19/2023
Qian’s bold and affecting debut collection explores aging, desire, cultural identity, and queer love among Asian girls and women. In “Zeroes:Ones,” Luna, 22, struggles to reconcile her Asian and American identities while on a fellowship in Suzhou, China, where she nurses her loneliness by playing a dating simulation game and keeping up a texting-only friendship with a stranger she calls Zero-One. Performance and reality collide in the eerie title story, which features a group of 20-somethings attending a cultish retreat on Mount Haruna in Japan, where the characters’ charged relationship dynamics come to a head, leading to an unexplained disappearance. Other stories delve more explicitly into the uncanny, as in the immersive “The Girl with the Double Eyelids,” in which a teenager who’s recently undergone eyelid surgery starts glimpsing imaginary symbols on other people’s bodies—an enormous pink tongue on the back of her teacher’s neck, a string of letters on her father’s wrist—that she believes might point to secrets they’re hiding. Throughout, Qian depicts with honesty and compassion her protagonists’ complex inner lives, portraying people who are by turns thrilled and afraid, desirous and resentful as they grapple with the anxieties of growing up. This is necessary and poignant. Agent: Annie Hwang, Pande Literary. (Aug.)
"Qian illuminates the lives of young Asian and Asian American women in a modern, globalized, hyper-digital world where the pressure to settle down persists."
The New York Times Book Review
"Precise imagery and a voice both sharply observant and yearning."
"A multifaceted collection that is beautifully paced and deeply introspective."
"Mischievous and hypnotizing, LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO takes us to manifold narrative realms where stories self-proliferate and artificial simulations often hijack and replace reality. Formally complex and emotionally potent, this is a collection I’ll return to again and again."
"Invigorating and surreal, exploring the alienated, technology-mediated lives of contemporary Asian and Asian American women. . . . Qian’s characters refuse stereotypes, instead questioning conventions and rebelling against consumer culture, the pressures of modern society and more."
A Best Book of August Purewow
"Vibrant and gritty and saturated with details."
"Perfectly askew, the stories in LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO thrum with restless questioning and acute longing, shot through with tart, knowing observations. It seemed to vibrate in my hands as I read it."
"One of the strongest story collections I have read in years, a book that astounds with both its subtlety and complexity."
A Best Story Collection of 2023 Largehearted Boy
"These stories shatter stereotypes and awaken vibrant, queer conversation through a glaring critique of our screen-filled society."
"Queering stereotypes of Asian American women and questioning our dependence on tech, these stories complicate consumerism, capitalism, duty and desire."
A Best Book of August Ms. Magazine
"Juicy, unsettling."
A Best Book of August NYLON
"Includes a supernatural karaoke machine, uncanny social experiments, dating sims, and a teen with unsettling visions after double eyelid surgery. I'm struggling to focus on anything else until I'm able to finish this startling, precise, and viscerally true book."
A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 Powell's
"Tales of dating simulations, post-surgery visions, a supernatural karaoke machine, and more."
Best Science Fiction Books of August Gizmodo
"Qian has given a voice to an entire generation of twentysomethings who are just as confused and stressed out as her protagonists are."
"Powerful."
"In LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO , Qian devastates like the best photographs from our youth, making us long for what’s lost while never losing sight of what is necessary for survival. The stories remind you that what you observe is already gone, and make you want to pay closer attention to what is already passing into memory."
"Hypnotic."
a Best Book of Summer TIME
"Surprising surreal elements and vivid prose reminiscent of a well-crafted Japanese Manga comic."
"An all-caps title, you say? I’m intrigued. I’ll also be honest: the publisher’s description of Cleo Qian’s LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO had my interest piqued the moment I saw the phrase “supernatural karaoke machine.” I will die on the hill that weird and speculative fiction would benefit from the addition of more karaoke — and I’m glad this book is adding to that milieu."
"Perceptive. . . . [an] astute debut collection populated by disconnected young women in flux."
"Eerie but compassionate. . . . Wildly imaginative yet unnervingly real, Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go fronts the anxieties and lonesomeness of twenty-first century Asian women."
A Best Debut Short Story Collection of 2023 Electric Literature
"An unnerving yet sanguine portrayal of finding connection in a detached world. . . . a frank yet earnest and sincere portrayal of humanity in our technological era."
"Surreal and enchanting. . . . Everyone who has doom-scrolled should read this."
a Best Book of August Debutiful
"Cleo Qian’s LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO is an uncanny Asian American fantasia where fringe artist collectives, melancholy K-pop stars, anxious piano prodigies, disembodied digital ghosts, and lovelorn alchemists converge. Deeply psychological, these stories confront the bizarre horrors of modern life, finding surprising beauty and supernatural catharsis. I’ll be thinking about these characters for a long, long time."
"LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO is sharp and unprecious about the sticky aspects of having flesh. This collection is riddled with outsiders of different shades, of people who stand back from their realities with secret and burning questions. There are really tender portraits of yearning, of the unsteady but precious entanglements of both platonic and romantic love. It’s careful and soberly rendered, and it was a pleasure to read."
"Qian has a great surrealist edge and a unique voice. A noteworthy debut collection that left me wanting more!"
"Surreal and enchanting."
a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 Debutiful
2023-06-08
In this promising collection’s opening story, “Chicken. Film. Youth,” Luna is back in her childhood city, LA, meeting up with friends who have all reached the point in their late 20s when they have “switched from wanting to get older to feeling like [they] could stand to be a little bit younger.” When the reader sees her again in “Zeroes:Ones,” she is just out of college, living in Suzhou, and working at the university language center as a tutor while she explores her complicated feelings about China as a “country both homeland and exotic.” Luna’s wanderings thread through the collection—she appears as a main character in four of the 11 stories—but the interstitial longing she feels about her Asian American identity, her sense of isolation, the aimlessness of adulthood after the driving promise of youth, and the driving question of what comes next are the guiding forces behind all the stories in this lovely but sometimes listless book. Often, the dominantly female main characters are lured into situations that fizz with menace—such as Nora in “Monitor World,” who matches with the mysterious agamemnon_the_king on a site for “lovers of the underground” only to discover that his sexual prowess hides darker, and somehow more quotidian, desires; or Emi in the title story, who runs into a childhood friend in Tokyo and shortly afterward finds herself isolated in a house on the slopes of Mount Haruna, participating in an ominous conceptual art project sponsored by the cultish Anti-Civilization Committee. Sometimes, as in the standout stories “The Girl With the Double Eyelids,” “Power and Control,” and “Seagull Village,” a world with alternative rules in which visions reveal hidden truths, alchemy is a black-market hobby, and spirits roam freely is laid over our own to reveal startling and subtle truths. More often than not, however, both the sense of threat and magic fizzle out in the face of the stifling ennui that keeps most of Qian’s characters enacting the same apathetic orbits even when they attempt radical escape.
Luminously written stories that do not quite finish telling their tales.
