Vertical Motion

By: Can Xue, Karen Gernant - translator, Chen Zeping - translator

Narrated by: Eunice Wong, Tim Lounibos

Two young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbor's consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while he's asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs . . .

Can Xue is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The stories in this striking and lyrical new collection—populated by old married couples, children, cats, and nosy neighbors, the entire menagerie of the everyday—reaffirm Can Xue's reputation as one of the most innovative Chinese writers in a generation.

©2011 Can Xue; Translation copyright 2011 by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (P)2024 Tantor

Critic reviews

"There's a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue." -Robert Coover