Love in the New Millennium

by Can Xue Narrated by Janet Song

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

In this dreamlike novel . . . amid increasingly bizarre scenarios, appearances give way to hidden, otherworldly layers.”—New Yorker

“Ambitious . . . masterful. . . . Can Xue’s superb experimental novel is sure to keep readers hooked.”—Emily Park, Booklist

“A solo dance in the dark, a metaphysical picture of secular life that operates on its own elusive emotional logic . . . the book takes place in a dreamscape . . . like looking deeply into a painting—Dali’s playful surprises bathed in Munch’s crepuscular light.”—Kevin Wang, Columbia Journal

“Translator Annelise Finegan Wasmoen conveys a remarkable linguistic simplicity while maintaining the weirdness of Xue’s descriptive passages and dialogues, which are rather like non-sequiturs. . . . This is a challenging but worthy path into Xue’s body of work.”—Aaron Robertson, Literary Hub, “The 10 Best Translated Novels of the Decade”

“Suspended time . . . narratives [that] shift between chapters . . . buoyancy . . . humor and surprise. . . . The millennium reads not necessarily as a change in years, but as an edge or threshold the characters are moving through.”—Kelly Krumrie, Full Stop

“Tackling age-old themes of love’s many iterations, Can Xue continues to upend comfortable notions of structure, narrative, plot, and character while crafting stories that linger in the mind long after the last page has been turned.”—World Literature Today

“A mesmerizing, dreamlike novel . . . kaleidoscopic tales of love, loss, and the impermanence of the human condition.”—Ursula Deser Friedman, Reading in Translation

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019

Best Translated Book Award long list finalist in the Fiction category, sponsored by Three Percent

Shortlisted for the Internationaler Literaturpreis 2022, sponsored by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Foundation Elementarteilchen

“Love in the New Millennium is, as always with Can Xue’s work, a marvel. She is one of the most innovative and important contemporary writers in China and, in my opinion, in world literature.”—Bradford Morrow, author of The Prague Sonata

Praise for Can Xue:
 
“There’s a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue.”—Robert Coover
 
“If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue.”—Susan Sontag

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171103460
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/12/2019
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters
Edition description:	Unabridged

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