Rouge Street: Three Novellas

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY LITERARY HUB, BUSTLE, BOOK CULTURE, AND THE MILLIONS

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 inspirations and grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.

Author: Shuang Xuetao
Publisher: Metropolitan Books
Published: 04/19/2022
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.30w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9781250835871

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 02/28/2022
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2022
Shelf Awareness 04/29/2022

About the Author
Shuang Xuetao is one of the most significant young Chinese writers. Born in 1983 on Rouge Street in the city of Shenyang, Shuang has written six volumes of fiction, for which he has won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and, most recently, the $50,000 Blancpain-Imaginist Award for best Chinese writer under forty-five. His short stories and novellas, including "Moses on the Plain," have seen major adaptations for television and film. Shuang lives in Beijing.