Interview with Can Xue from the Reykjavik International Literary Festival
Last week I had the opportunity to interview Can Xue as part of the Reykjavik International Literary Festival. We ended up writing out our interview ahead of time, so I thought I would share it here. Enjoy! Born in China, where her parents were persecuted as being “ultra-rightists” by the Anti-rightest Movement of ...
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July 2013 Asymptote Journal
The new issue of Asymptote is now available, and GOD DAMN is it loaded. Just read this intro note from the editors: Every translation is a conversation, each translator in dialogue with the original author, each language speaking to another. Asymptote’s Summer issue is full of such conversations, perhaps most ...
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John Darnielle, Open Letter, and What You Should Be Reading
Amid all the ALTA excitement (I’ll post some sort of roundup later today—I’m still recovering), this post about what John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats went up on Fader, and contains a ton of really great statements about Open Letter and international lit in general: Before that, I read Can Xue’s ...
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Latest Review: "Vertical Motion" by Can Xue
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is Lily Ye’s review of Vertical Motion, this week’s Read This Next title. Vertical Motion is coming out next month from Open Letter, and is translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. For an “experimental” Chinese writer, Can Xue has ...
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Vertical Motion
The word that continues to come to mind as I read Can Xue’s short stories in Vertical Motion is uncanny. Her stories summon the feeling of the familiar as unfamiliar, of the known as unknown. The uncanny, Freud’s unheimlisch, is often described as having to do with a return, a repetition of the known which reveals an ...
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Interview with Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping [Read This Next]
As part of this week’s Read This Next activities, we just published an interview with Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping about their translation of Can Xue’s Vertical Motion. Here’s an excerpt: Read This Next: You’ve been working with Can Xue for a while now. How did you first discover her ...
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Vertical Motion by Can Xue [Read This Next]
This week’s Read This Next title is Vertical Motion, a new collection of stories by Can Xue, which is translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping and coming out from Open Letter in mid-September. Super-intern Lily Ye explains why we selected this book for RTN: This week we’ve chosen Can ...
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