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The Last Lover (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Literature & Fiction

Can, Xue

Literary

Yale University Press

The first full-length novel by Chinese author Can Xue to appear in English 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. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless interplay of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, as the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices. Madam X is a vehicle whereby the people bare their souls, through whom they reveal themselves even as they try to penetrate the mystery of her extraordinary powers.
Five Spice Street is one of the most astonishing novels of the past twenty years. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day—whether in China or in the West—where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.

Five Spice Street (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for fiction, presented by Three Percent, a resource for international literature In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.” Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing-store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped—or helped.

Love in the New Millennium (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

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 flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Can Xue’s masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love’s many guises—satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling—against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, and sex and romance drawn from the East and the West.

Humor & Satire

Product Description \nLonglisted 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\nCan 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.\nCombining 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 consciousness and oblivion. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and can make us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us. Delightful, enchanting, and filled with secrets, Can Xue’s newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality.\nReview 
“Sixteen dreamlike stories, translated from the Chinese, merge the physical and the philosophical.”— 
New York Times Book Review\n“[An] eerie, unpredictable, cracked and crazy world . . . Sheer reading pleasure for sophisticated readers and a worthy starting point for initiates.”— 
Library Journal\n“[An] exquisite collection . . . Can Xue is a master at twisting philosophical ideas into realities that seem simple but are incredibly thoughtful and intricate. These sixteen poetic stories have astonishing depth that will transfix readers.”—Emily Park, 
Booklist\n“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\n“Wade into the often unsettlingly beautiful universe Can Xue has created until you are swimming in it, your head beneath the water.”—Julie Cadman, 
Michigan Quarterly Review\n“Can Xue is like the Lady Gaga of modern Chinese literature. Both are enthroned sphinxes of world culture today. . . . [Can Xue’s] work is often outlandish and macabre, eschewing narrative conventions of linearity; it can be comical, but also somber. . . . Her latest short fiction collection, 
I Live in the Slums, fully lives up to that colorful reputation.”—Victoria Zhuang, 
Harvard Review\nLonglisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Prose, sponsored by The American Literary Translators Association \nAbout the Author \nCan Xue is the pseudonym of the renowned avant‑garde author Deng Xiaohua. Her previous works include 
Five Spice Street 
, 
Vertical Motion, The Last Lover 
, 
Frontier 
, and 
Love in the New Millennium 
. 
Karen Gernant is professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University. 
Chen Zeping is professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou.

I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Barefoot Doctor: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

A profound, poignant story of a village healer and her community, from one of the world's great contemporary novelists &nbsp; "A complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China . . . [that] offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life."--Publishers Weekly &nbsp; "A barefoot doctor herself, [Can Xue] has a unique and powerful way of transporting readers to new worlds where reality and magic are intertwined, and she uses her own experiences to make this novel feel more personal."--Emily Park, Booklist &nbsp; In rural Yun Village, herbalist Mrs. Yi lives with her husband in a cottage at the foot of Niulan Mountain, where she gathers herbs to treat the ailments of the villagers by day and studies medicine by night. Sickness and herbs are lovers, she tells her patients, rejoicing when they recover, comforting them when they do not. All the while, she hopes to find a worthy successor to take up her mantle. As curious younger villagers observe Mrs. Yi and begin imitating her work--planting gardens and studying the art of healing--they soon discover that the line dividing life from death is porous, and the mountain is more mysterious than they ever knew. &nbsp; Drawing on her experiences as a barefoot doctor in her youth, Can Xue returns with a transporting novel that alights in the in-between spaces: between the living and the dead, healer and sick, nature and us.

A profound, poignant story of a village healer and her community, from one of the world's great contemporary novelists &nbsp; "A complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China . . . [that] offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life."--Publishers Weekly &nbsp; "A barefoot doctor herself, [Can Xue] has a unique and powerful way of transporting readers to new worlds where reality and magic are intertwined, and she uses her own experiences to make this novel feel more personal."--Emily Park, Booklist &nbsp; In rural Yun Village, herbalist Mrs. Yi lives with her husband in a cottage at the foot of Niulan Mountain, where she gathers herbs to treat the ailments of the villagers by day and studies medicine by night. Sickness and herbs are lovers, she tells her patients, rejoicing when they recover, comforting them when they do not. All the while, she hopes to find a worthy successor to take up her mantle. As curious younger villagers observe Mrs. Yi and begin imitating her work--planting gardens and studying the art of healing--they soon discover that the line dividing life from death is porous, and the mountain is more mysterious than they ever knew. &nbsp; Drawing on her experiences as a barefoot doctor in her youth, Can Xue returns with a transporting novel that alights in the in-between spaces: between the living and the dead, healer and sick, nature and us.

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019 The most ambitious work of fiction by one of the world's greatest writers "In this dreamlike novel . . . amid increasingly bizarre scenarios, appearances give way to hidden, otherworldly layers." --New Yorker In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and conspiracies abound. Some try to flee--whether to a mysterious gambling bordello, underground ancestral homes, or Nest County, where traditional medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Can Xue's mesmerizing storytelling traces love's many guises--satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling--against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, and sex and romance drawn from the East and the West.

A series of short stories features such offbeat characters as a doctor-detective-warrior who sleeps like a hippo in a cistern and a homicidal maniac housewife whose husband ends up in the hospital with a stomach full of needles.

The Embroidered Shoes: Stories

Contemporary

Henry Holt Co.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Can, Xue. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Can, Xue

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Can, Xue. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Last Lover (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Five Spice Street (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Last Lover (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Five Spice Street (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Love in the New Millennium (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

I Live in the Slums: Stories (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Barefoot Doctor: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Barefoot Doctor: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Love in the New Millennium (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

The Embroidered Shoes: Stories