Can Xue’s first story collection in over a decade is a frenetic adventure through China’s slums. These sixteen pieces show the gritty reality of urban life, taking readers through sewers, behind concrete walls, and inside claustrophobic rooms. At the same time, with their varied and unreliable narrators, these narratives seem to unfold somewhere between the physical world and the fantastic world--charting dizzying liminal spaces where the only constants are incessant change and uncertainty. Despite this fundamental disorientation, Can Xue’s stories are threaded by questions of human nature, and what it means to share space with other forms of life. I Live in the Slums is not for everyone, but those that do decide to venture into Can Xue’s world will certainly be mesmerized.
Cook's novel is a virtuoso exploration of humanity's relationship to nature. Set in a futuristic America where the entire population lives in a giant, polluted, smog-ridden city-state, the narrative focuses on Bea, a young mother hoping to save her sick child, Agnes. Along with 18 others, the pair volunteer to move into the Wilderness State--a vast western territory that has been closed to humans--as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Timely and expansive, Cook's fiction will change the way you see nature.
