From multi-award-winning author Yan Ge, a shimmering, genre-bending
English-language debut that announces the next phase in a major literary
career.
"A bewitching collection of stories that will leave you awestruck,
shaken, and wanting to reach for it again and again." --Paul Yoon,
author of Run Me to Earth
In twenty years, Yan Ge has authored thirteen books written in Chinese,
working across an impressive range of genres and subjects. Now, Yan Ge
transposes her dynamic storytelling onto another linguistic landscape.
The result is a collection humming with her trademark wit and style--and
with the electricity of a seasoned artist flexing her virtuosity with a
new medium.
A young woman bonds with an encampment of poets after a devastating
earthquake. Against her better judgment, a college student begins to
fall for an acquaintance who might be dead. And a Confucian disciple
returns to the Master bearing a jar full of grisly remains. Weaving
between reality and dreamy surreality, these nine stories wend toward
elsewhere, a comforting, frustrating, just-out-of-reach place familiar
to anyone who has ever experienced longing. Through it all Yan Ge's
protagonists peer thoughtfully at their own feelings of
displacement--physical or emotional, the result of travel, emigration,
or exile. Brilliant and irresistibly readable, Elsewhere explores the
utility (or not) of art in the face of lonesomeness, quotidian, and
spectacular.
This highly anticipated collection is further proof that Yan Ge is a
generational literary talent, to be watched closely for decades to come.
