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Title details for Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao - Available

Rouge Street

Three Novellas

by Shuang Xuetao
Jeremy Tiang
Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
2 of 2 copies available
Introduced by Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker finalist novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing
From one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers, three dazzling novellas of Northeast China, mixing realism, mysticism, and noir.
An inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks.
Rouge Street presents three novellas by Shuang Xuetao, the lauded young Chinese writer whose frank, fantastical short fiction has already inspired comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Located in China's frigid Northeast, Shenyang, the
author's birthplace, boasts an illustrious past—legend holds that the emperor's makeup was manufactured here. But while the city enjoyed renewed importance as an industrial hub under Mao Zedong, China's subsequent transition from communism to a market
economy led to an array of social ills—unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, suicide—that gritty Shenyang epitomizes.
Orbiting the toughest neighborhood of a postindustrial city whose vast, inhospitable landscape makes every aspect of life a struggle, these many-voiced missives are united by Shuang Xuetao's singular style—one that balances hardscrabble naturalism with the
transcendent and faces the bleak environs with winning humor. Rouge Street illuminates not only the hidden pains of those left behind in an extraordinary economic boom but also the inspiration and grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 19, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781705050194
      • File size: 187678 KB
      • Duration: 06:30:59

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      February 28, 2022
      Shuang makes his English-language debut with three beautifully spare novellas exploring present day northeast China and the imprints of the past. In “The Aeronaut,” Li Mingqi arrives at his deceased father’s alcoholic mentor’s home in 1979 to court the man’s daughter. In an alternating thread set decades later, Mingqi’s nephew tracks him down after he disappears in pursuit of an aviation obsession. In “Bright Hall,” Zhang Mo’s unemployed father sends him to live with his aunt Zhang Yafeng, a former dancer. After the murder of Pastor Lin, a grieving Yafeng sends her own daughter away with Mo, and their journey takes on fairy tale dimensions. “Moses on the Plain” loosely follows an investigation into several carjacking murders, and Shuang shifts perspectives between various people connected to the events, including a policeman who is injured in a sting operation; new investigating officer Zhuang Shu, who has a speckled past; and Li Fei, a precocious girl tutored by Shu’s mom. Shuang sustains a cool, placid tone, even when reckoning with lingering traumas of the Cultural Revolution, Japanese occupation, and economic decline. Anglophone readers will be glad to get to know this rising star.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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