2022-04-13
These three novellas are a magical and gritty tour through life in Shenyang’s Yanfen Street shantytown, set against the backdrop of Mao’s China.
Shifting continuously among the perspectives of multiple characters and sometimes reaching across generations, Shuang blurs the boundaries among memory, imagination, and historical events. In the first novella, The Aeronaut, flashily dressed Li Mingqi courts the daughter of his father’s former mentor at a Communist leaflet printing firm, who still resents his one-time apprentice for outshining him. Mingqi’s visit sets off a series of events that force him to reckon with his father’s death and its rippling effects on the family. The narrator of the second novella, Bright Hall, is a young man still suffering from his mother’s abandonment when he was a boy. When he and his cousin Gooseberry, a dancer, chase down the suspect in the murder of an illegal preacher, their escapade leads them onto a frozen lake and into a dreamlike interrogation with a monster fish of biblical proportions. The final novella, Moses on the Plain, follows the aftermath of a string of taxi robberies and the people who are intertwined with them, including a young girl who has a fascination with fire and whose family falls into ever more dire financial circumstances. Shuang reaches the height of his literary powers when magical realism breaks through into the everyday lives of the characters, revealing the emotional and political stakes of their actions and desires. Patient and attentive readers willing to follow Shuang through the twists and turns of the characters’ shifting narratives will be rewarded with a surreal portrait of how history is made and remembered—expanding and contracting like an Escher cityscape.
An ambitious portrait of the struggle to thrive in the Chinese equivalent of the “American Wild West.
"These stories unfold in northeast China, centered on the author’s home city, Shenyang, a region that has had little literary representation available to English speakers . . . For all the bleakness that his characters encounter there—violence, poverty, retribution—there are moments of possibility and levity, too."
—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times ("12 New Books Coming in April")
"In sparse, vernacular prose, Shuang uses fabulist noir to evoke the pace of social change . . . 'The past has nothing to do with the present,' one character admonishes, and Shuang’s multi-voiced narratives both challenge and confirm that maxim, conveying the contested legacies of recent Chinese history."
—The New Yorker ("Briefly Noted")
"[Rouge Street] turns . . . from the powerfully realistic to the fantastical and surreal, in an existential theater reminiscent of Pirandello or Sartre . . . Shuang weaves with Dostoevskian skill the voices and experiences of the players in this drama . . . Through various monologues, the novella creates not just a suspenseful thriller, but a textured, rich portrait of a community over time."
—Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine
"[Shuang Xuetao is] one of the most promising Chinese writers of his generation . . . Shuang’s characters share this affliction: they are abandoned by the state, by their biological families, by the socialist lifeworlds that nourished them. They collect along Rouge Street, a road that provides temporary respite for criminals, orphans, heretics, and minor deities—all exiles from Chinese modernity."
—Henry Zhang, Guernica
"Remarkable . . . enigmatic . . . The three novellas in Rouge Street…feature multilayered voices revealing intricate perspectives that result in gloriously gratifying rewards . . . His crisp, unadorned sentences might seem to contrast his fantastical twists and turns, but that irresistible combination is waiting to be discovered by lucky new audiences."
—Terry Hong, Shelf Awareness
"Shuang makes his English-language debut with three beautifully spare novellas exploring present day northeast China and the imprints of the past . . . Shuang sustains a cool, placid tone, even when reckoning with lingering traumas . . . Readers will be glad to get to know this rising star."
—Publishers Weekly
"Magical and gritty . . . An ambitious portrait of the struggle to thrive in the Chinese equivalent of the 'American Wild West' . . . Shifting continuously among the perspectives of multiple characters and sometimes reaching across generations, Shuang blurs the boundaries among memory, imagination, and historical events . . . Readers . . . will be rewarded with a surreal portrait of how history is made and remembered—expanding and contracting like an Escher cityscape."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Set in Shenyang, a post-industrial city in the northeast of China, Xuetao’s novellas are as beautifully frigid and gritty as the city he writes about, as he inspects the dust left following an economic boom, and the things that percolate in spite of loss and unfulfilled promise.”
—Literary Hub ("Most Anticipated Books of 2022")
"Set in a New York-sized city in the chilly climes of northwestern China, the three novellas in Shuang Xuetao’s Rouge Street attempt to capture real lives lived on the boundary between fantasy and reality. As gritty as it is hopeful, this collection from an established voice in Chinese literature is one of the year’s most anticipated English translations."
—Bustle ("Most Anticipated Books of April 2022")
"Shuang Xuetao presents a vivid picture that captures the various voices of Shenyang’s natives . . . Shuang’s stories are fundamentally about hope, aspiration, and resilience.”
—The Millions ("Most Anticipated Books of 2022")
"Jaw-droppingly brilliant . . . I can only hope that we see more of Xuetao's work translated in the coming years."
—Ian Mond, LOCUS
"Shuang Xuetao is a magician, suffusing failed lives with redemption and even delight. These are families out of Greek tragedy, rich intergenerational dramas reminiscent of Bi Feiyu's Three Sisters, as evocative of a particular time and place in China, detailed and strange and heartbreaking. But above all the darkness is a lighter and more generous vision of people who can survive China's great changes and yet still forgive, invent, and sail off into futures you would never expect."
—David Vann, author of Aquarium and Caribou Island
“The three novellas of Rouge Street give us an acerbic view of a chilly industrialized region, abject and desolate, tempered by Shuang Xuetao’s inability to form a petty thought and his generous, sometimes humorous tolerance of ambiguity.”
—Susanna Moore, author of In the Cut and Miss Aluminum
“What draws me to Shuang Xuetao's work is his superlative language, his short, playful, muscular sentences. His down-to-earth narratives unfold at a leisurely pace, yet they remain powerful. The result is a singular mode of storytelling.”
—Mo Yan, Nobel Prize–winning author of Red Sorghum
“Shuang Xuetao is the most distinctive young Chinese writer. With lyrical language and uncanny narration, he expresses the intense love that literature has for humanity—especially its lowest order. To read his writing is to have your heart pierced, as well as to experience the power of art, which can be a beam of light slicing through the darkness.”
—Yan Lianke, author of The Day the Sun Died
“Shuang Xuetao's meteoric rise in the last few years is a testament to the power of his writing. He has clearly been influenced by modernism—Wang Xiaobo, Hemingway and Murakami are all his mentors.”
—David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University
“We unanimously hailed the author's adventurous spirit and thanked him for creating a literary magnetic field that teaches us new ways to spin.”
—Su Tong, author of Raise the Red Lantern, in the citation for the 2020 Blancpain-Imaginist Award
“Growing up amid the decay of China’s industrial base, Shuang Xuetao writes with a devastating sense of decline. His words may conform to conventional realism, yet they radiate a mysterious aura that cannot be dispelled.”
—Yu Hua, author of To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
Brian Nishii gives these three novellas a vivid, unforgettable performance. His sense of timing and his pace work well, and he shifts his tone from character to character subtly but intelligently. Honoring the spare prose, Nishii illuminates the harsh existences of the characters. Job loss, beatings, and other violence take place, but there’s wit and whimsy, too. Family competition over status provides humor. Shuang Xuetao is among China’s most honored young writers; ROUGE STREET is his first work to be translated into English. He captures industrial Shenyang, the part of China that was left behind after the economic restructuring. His prose is grounded in the quotidian, yet he can remind the listener of Borges or Kafka. This audiobook is immersive and haunting. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
Brian Nishii gives these three novellas a vivid, unforgettable performance. His sense of timing and his pace work well, and he shifts his tone from character to character subtly but intelligently. Honoring the spare prose, Nishii illuminates the harsh existences of the characters. Job loss, beatings, and other violence take place, but there’s wit and whimsy, too. Family competition over status provides humor. Shuang Xuetao is among China’s most honored young writers; ROUGE STREET is his first work to be translated into English. He captures industrial Shenyang, the part of China that was left behind after the economic restructuring. His prose is grounded in the quotidian, yet he can remind the listener of Borges or Kafka. This audiobook is immersive and haunting. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
