Can Xue

• Mar-2026
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A celebration of the beguiling power of literature, from one of the world’s greatest storytellers At the Pigeon Book Club, a circle of readers gathers for exhilarating meetings to discuss literature. The only requirements for entry are an ...

• Apr-2025
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Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIn Mother River, Can Xue, one of China's most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves ...

• Oct-2022
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A profound, poignant story of a village healer and her community, from one of the world's great contemporary novelists "A complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China . . . [that] offers profound insights about what it means to p...

• May-2020
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A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature Can Xue's stories observe no obvious conventions of plot or characterization. That is the only rule they follow. Instead, they tend t...

• Nov-2018
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The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and fa...

• Mar-2017
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New Novel from the Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book AwardIntroduction by Porochista Khakpour."One of the most raved-about works of translated fiction this year" -- Jonathan Sturgeon, FlavorwireFrontier opens with the story of Liujin, a young w...

• Aug-2015
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Can Xue (pronounced "tsan shway") is considered by many to be the most spirited, fearless, radical fiction writer to come out of contemporary China. Even her name is marked by tenacity (it's a pen name referring to dirty, leftover snow that refuses t...

• Sep-2011
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"There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue." -- Robert CooverTwo young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, inv...

• Mar-2009
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Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Som...

• Jun-2006
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A selection of harsh, sometimes violent, and often surreal stories by the premier young avant-garde Chinese woman writer. A couple moves with their young daughter to the seaside, only to be terrorized by hostile townsfolk, predatory seabirds, and the...

• May-1992
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Can Xue draws the reader into a world of the grotesque and the surreal, of uncertain spaces and indeterminate identities, of sexual menace and psychological disorientation. These novellas are about life in post-Mao China, but not the China of social ...

• Jun-1989
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The thirteen stories of Dialogues in Paradise are eloquent in a way the West associates with both the modern and the ancient: the dark oracles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the paranoid mystery of Kafka, the moving stream of Woolf. The work of Can Xue ...