Love in the New Millennium

Margellos World Republic of Letters

By: Can Xue, Annelise Finegan Wasmoen - translator, Eileen Myles - foreword

Narrated by: Janet Song

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

©2013 Can Xue; English translation copyright 2018 by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen; foreword copyright 2018 by Eileen Myles (P)2019 Tantor

Very beautiful

More works like this should be made into audiobooks. For us disabled unable to read, I feel like I'm missing out constantly cause the very populistic/square/netflix-like content is the only one available. All the authors I want to read have no audiobooks.

This is tough read if you expect the same and can't relax and let the work lead you. A lot of beautiful stanzas and very good humor. Mimicking my racing thoughts perfectly. Gorgeous book!