Strange Beasts of China, Yan Ge
£11.99
Out of stock
In the city of Yong’an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures – with their greenish stomachs or gills or strange birthmarks – live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness, some with ancient forbears, others engineered as artificial breeds.
Guided – and often misguided – by her elusive university professor, and his scrappy student sidekick Zhong Liang, our narrator finds herself on a mission to track down each species. And as she blunders from one implausible situation to the next, she comes one step closer to revealing her own inner beast…
Paperback: 240 pages
Published 2022
ISBN: 9781612199702
Out of stock
Description
‘The atmosphere of “Strange Beasts of China” is delightful. Through the narrator’s futile quest to catalog beasts, Yan captures the fluidness of city life, the way urban space defies definition even for people hellbent on making sense of it’ New York Times
‘I don’t know if it was the unexpected twists and turns in the protagonist’s storyline, or Tiang’s playful-yet-searing English, or the mirror this book holds up to our willingness to be divided and conquered, but I simply could not put this one down’ Heather Cleary, LitHub
Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English. Yan’s first short story collection was published in China when she was seventeen. She is the author of thirteen books, including six novels. She has received numerous awards, including the prestigious Maodun Literature Prize (Best Young Writer). She was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. Her work has been translated into English, French and German, among other languages. Her novels translated into English include The Chilli Bean Paste Clan (Balestier Press 2018, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman). She lives in Norwich, UK.
Image of Yan Ge courtesy of Tilted Axis Press
Jeremy Tiang is a Singaporean writer, translator, and playwright, based in New York City. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including novels by Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Chan Ho-Kei, and is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Grant, an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, and a People’s Literature Prize Mao-Tai Cup for Translation. He has also translated plays by Wei Yu-Chia, Zhan Jie and Xu Nuo. His own plays include Salesman之死, The Last Days of Limehouse and A Dream of Red Pavilions (adapted from the novel by Cao Xueqin), and he is the author of a short story collection, It Never Rains on National Day, which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize (2015) and a novel, State of Emergency (Epigram Books, 2017). He is also co-editor with Kavita Bhanot of Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022).
Photo of Jeremy Tiang courtesy of Tilted Axis Press
