Love in the New Millennium

by Can Xue, Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Translator), Eileen Myles (Preface by)

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 flowerbeds 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 only be reached 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 drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300240481
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/20/2018
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Can Xue is the pseudonym of the new experimental author Deng Xiaohua, born in 1953. Formerly a tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen is academic director and clinical assistant professor of translation at NYU School of Professional Studies. Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist living in New York City and Marfa, Texas. Afterglow (a dog memoir) was published by Grove in September 2017 and Evolution (poems) is out in fall 2018.
 

Table of Contents

Foreword: Inside Can Xue Eileen Myles ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Love in the New Millennium

1 Cuilan and Wei Bo 3

2 Wei Bo and A Si's Past Affair 45

3 Long Sixiang's Inner Quest 82

4 Wei Bo's Wife Xiao Yuan 100

5 The Antiques Appraiser 117

6 The Doctor's Worldview 144

7 Wei Bo in Prison 163

8 Officer Xiao He's One-Sided Love 181

9 Sentimental Education 191

10 In Nest County 203

11 Brave A Si 234

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher