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Mother river stories

"Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award. In Mother River, Can Xue, one of China's most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge...

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Main Author: Canxue, 1953- (Author)
Other Authors: Gernant, Karen (Translator), Zeping, Chen (Translator)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Chinese
Published: Rochester, NY : Open Letter, 2025.
Edition:First edition.
Subjects:
Rivers > Fiction.
Short stories.
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Summary:"Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award. In Mother River, Can Xue, one of China's most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence. Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries between the known and unknown, between humanity and nature. In these tales, a man tries to chase down an elusive golden peacock, a woman communicates with mysterious, shifting forms of light, and the river that runs through a small village seems to pulse with memories of its own. Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue's status as one of the most rewarding and complex writers working today--and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize."--Amazon.com.
Physical Description:261 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN:9781960385314
1960385313
Author Notes:Ts'an Hsueh was born in Ch'angsha, Hunan, of Communist party activists who married for love and shared the same ideals. However, only four years after her birth, they were declared Rightists and lost their positions at the New Hunan Newspaper office. Her mother was shipped off to a rural commune, where she suffered from illness and malnutrition. Ts'an Hsueh's maternal grandmother died of starvation in 1961. Ts'an Hsueh's education was cut short a few years later by the Cultural Revolution, when she had just finished primary school. For 10 years she worked at various jobs in iron casting, machine fitting, and light industry. In 1978 she met another rusticated youth who had returned to Ch'angsha and had become a carpenter. They married, had a baby, and decided to begin their own tailoring business. Ts'an Hsueh began writing fiction during the mid-1980s. Either she accidentally stumbled onto a nonreferential style of writing, or she was actively influenced by Western works in translation; at any rate, she is one of the few Chinese writers to carry out experiments in this direction. As Charlotte Innes writes in her foreword to Old Floating Cloud, a book containing two of Ts'an Hsueh's novellas, "to read Can Xue is . . . like falling asleep over a history book and dreaming a horribly distorted version of what you've just read."Her stories are not allegorical, but there are just enough political phrases sprinkled through them to make one feel that the author's own history and China's destiny are not totally divorced from her surreal world. One cannot approach Ts'an Hsueh's works as one would earlier mainland Chinese fiction. Rather than the familiar conventions of Socialist realism, one finds bizarre, morbid, and scatological imagery that may initially repel but that may also fascinate, if seen as an attempt to render symbolically her vision of a revolution degenerated into a nightmare in which humanity's more noble sentiments have been totally debased. Reading Ts'an Hsueh is a challenge that actively engages the reader in a quest for intelligibility and possible hidden significance. (Bowker Author Biography)

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